Large open pit mines in close proximity to centres as large as Kamloops are unlikely

EDITOR’S NOTE: TRU Economics Professor Dr. Peter Tsigaris writes regularly for The Armchair Mayor News on issues and ideas.

By DR. PETER TSIGARIS/

People living in Kamloops often wonder if it is common to find an open pit mine close to a large urban city. This editorial attempts to shed some light into this important issue for the local community, the various government bodies and the international community.

Data from the website http://www.infomine.com/minesite/ were collected for 157 open pit mines around the world. The website also identified the closest towns or cities to the mines. Some towns/cities were closest to more than one mine. In addition, information on the population size of the towns and cities was collected from various sources.

The evidence presented below indicates that it is extremely unlikely to observe a large open pit mine in close proximity to a large urban city like Kamloops. The probability (chance) of observing a town with a small population (i.e., a “small town”) closest to an open pit mine is significantly higher than the probability of observing a town or city with a larger population.

The number of towns/cities observed closest to open pit mines falls very fast (exponentially) as the population of the town/cities increases. Figure 1 shows the pattern in Australia.

There are 23 towns/cities identified and 40 open pit mines in Australia. Eleven very small towns are nearby open pit mines. This is followed by six town/cities in the 5,000 population range. Then only three towns/cities are in the 10,000 population range.

A very small number of towns/cities appear in higher population ranges. Kalgoorlie has the highest population at approximately 32,000. The mine is adjacent to the city. Kamloops is almost three times larger than Kalgoorlie. The average distance of these towns/cities from their respective mines is 40 kilometers. Many towns/cities are very close while others are far away in distance.

In Australia, open pit mines are not near large urban cities of the size of Kamloops or larger. Kalgoorlie is at the tail end of the distribution. It is not difficult to compute the chances of observing an open pit mine near a large urban city like Kamloops (or larger) in Australia. Assuming that the distribution is exponentially declining, the chances of a city the size of Kamloops (or greater) being observed close to an open pit mine in Australia is approximately 1 in 20 million.

The odds of winning the 6/49 lottery is approximately 1 in 14 million. It is not only in Australia; a similar pattern can be observed in Canada as shown in Figure 2.

Out of 16 towns/cities, there are nine very small towns that are closest to open pit mines. Only four cities with a population size of 10,000 are closest to open pit mines including Williams Lake. Williams Lake is the closest town to Gibraltar mine. The distance between Williams Lake and Gibraltar mine is 60 km. Fort McMurray is surrounded by four oil sands with an average distance of 55 km from the city.

Timmins, Ontario is nearby an open pit mine, but Timmin’ population of 43,000 is half the size of Kamloops. Furthermore, Timmins’ topography is very different from Kamloops. See the Dome Mine and its proximity to South Porcupine, a small community of Timmins at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dome_Mine_2.JPG

The U.S. has a similar frequency distribution to that of Canada and Australia. In the U.S., there is one city close to an open pit mine that has a similar population size as Kamloops. This is West Jordan in Salt Lake County. The Bingham Canyon mine owned by Rio Tinto group is very close to Salt Lake City County.

The large mine has been operating since 1906. West Jordan was incorporated in 1941 and grew towards the mine, but kept a certain distance as seen in Figure 3. The pit of the mine from the Centre of the city is 16 km. It is extremely unlikely that the mine would be allowed to expand towards West Jordan if this was ever a consideration.

Salt Lake County, which has similar topography and winter inversions like Kamloops, is ranked one of the worst U.S. counties in terms of particulate matter and air pollution. For further details on Salt Lake County’s air quality see http://utah.sierraclub.org/content/utah-air-quality.

Including developing and under developed economically nations in the sample does not change the pattern. There are many very small towns closest to open pit mines relative to larger towns/cities. As the population of the towns/cities increases, the frequency of observing these larger towns/cities close to open pit mines falls very fast.

A handful of cities, larger in population than Kamloops, are closest to respective open pit mines. These cities are all located in developing nations such as Brazil, Chile, and Peru. But even there, most of these cities are far away in distance from the mines, as indicated in Figure 4.

However, there is an exception. There is an open pit gold mine that is very close (3 km) to Obuasi, Ghana. I leave it to the readers to investigate the socioeconomic conditions of the Obuasi city in Ghana, which is easy to find by the Google search engine.

After searching across 157 open pit mines, and 122 towns/cities around the world, finding a large open pit mine close to a large urban area like Kamloops is extremely rare.

What can we conclude from the above analysis? Large open pit mines are more commonly located closer to small towns than to larger urban cities. Small towns nearby open pit mines remain small. They do not grow much over time.

There must be a reason for this universal pattern and it has to do with the health impact. Open pit mines provide economic benefits but also discharge pollution. Pollution has an impact on health. Health impacts are proportional to the exposed populations.

The higher is the population of the town/city, the more people are exposed to pollution. Hence the higher is the expected health impact relative to a smaller town. I plan to explore the size of the town and the expected health impact in a future editorial.

The proposed KGHM Ajax project is unique in the world and is a very unusual case. The world will be watching a “one of a kind” experiment if such a project gets approved.