Aluminum Smelter in Trinidad - Environmental Dangers, Crime, Industrialization

An icy blast from Kárahnjúkar
Mark Meredith
Monday, March 28th 2005

The natural grandeur of Kárahnjúkar being carved up to provide aluminium smelting power. The overall impacts, say critics, will affect over 3,000 sq km, or three per cent of Iceland's total landmass
Part 2
Mark Meredith continues his investigation from the Sunday Express into the strange similarities between Iceland and Trinidad.
In 1999, Iceland's government began preparing a Master Plan for Hydro and Geothermal Energy Resources. It was "basically ready" in February 2002, say the International Rivers Network (IRN), and was supposed to inform parliamentary debate on Kárahnjúkar.
But the report was not released until after parliament passed legislation approving the Kárahnjúkar project in April 2002. In the report, the conservation value of Kárahnjúkar was the second highest of any of the 15 project sites considered, and one of the least acceptable in environmental terms.
An "independent analysis" concluded that Kárahnjúka "might well cause massive financial losses to Landsvirkjun (Iceland's National Power Company) and Iceland's society", say IRN.
While the University of Iceland said something those in sunny Chatham in Cedros might agree with: "that compared to the promotion of heavy industries, government support for education, infrastructure and ecotourism emerges as a much better (environmental and socio-economic) solution".
Iceland's National Planning Agency (NPA) rejected the Kárahnjúka project in 2001, only one of 120 hydroelectric power projects it has opposed.
"It had not been demonstrated that the gains resulting from the Kárahnjúkar Power Plant would be such to compensate for the substantial, irreversible negative environmental impact that the project would forseeably have on the natural environment and the utilisation of land", they said.
But four months after the NPA
turned down the project, the decision was overturned by Iceland's minister for the environment Siv Fridleifsdottir. In March 2003 Alcoa signed a deal for 40 years supply of power from Landsvirkjun.
The project´s construction has faced ongoing labour problems caused by Alcoa´s hiring of low-wage workers from Europe and China, it is alleged. The Karahnukar dam construction is expected to be delayed by four months.
The Icelandic labour movement is also involved in a dispute with the Italian dam construction company Impregilo, charging it of violating Icelandic law and agreements. IRN's report specifically warned of the dangers of using Impregilo, a company with a history of time and cost overruns.
In a new twist, an Icelandic court has just ordered Alcoa to undertake a new Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for their smelter.
Previously, the Icelandic Planning Agency had ruled that an EIA carried out by Norsk Hydro for a smelter at the same site was valid for Alcoa's smelter. Norsk Hydro were to develop a 420,000 ton smelter powered by Karahnjukar. But in 2002 they pulled out after a "strategic evaluation" and Alcoa stepped in.
Opponents of the project, like lawyer Atli Gislasson-one of a group of 26 citizens who in 2003 brought separate cases before the Icelandic high court and European Free Trade Association surveillance authority, challenging the government's lack of transparency-charged that if the government could force through Karahnjukar, "they figured they could get away with anything", and he said this is already happening.
"The minister for industry overruled an EIA and gave the go-ahead for a project on the Thjorsa river that will inundate part of a protected area-a project that had already been rejected by the local authority," he told the UK Guardian.
Critics among Iceland's neighbours say the island has a "democracy deficit". I asked Arni Finnsson, Chair of the Iceland Nature Conservation Association, Iceland's leading environmental NGO, if this was true.
"The way in which the Icelandic Government forced the Karahnjukar Project through is a sign of a democratic deficit as well as total disregard for environmental principles agreed in Rio 1992," he told me. "The incumbent government has waged a war against nature and environmental NGO's."
He added that the former Nature Conservation Agency, which opposed Karahnjukar, had been merged with another government institution, "thus paralysing it" - which, it might be argued, is not a million miles away from our own made-over Ministry of Public Utilities and the Environment.
Talking of democracy deficits, two weeks ago Trinidad and Tobago's Prime Minister Patrick Manning announced that the Cap de Ville/Chatham site was "full" and that the Government were "scouting around" for new lands to level for industry without going to Parliament for approvals in changes in land use.
To rub salt in Cedros wounds, his statement was made some days after he had received a petition of 3,000 signatures delivered to Whitehall from Chatham and Cap de Ville residents opposing Alcoa's smelter in their area.
No one knows who their other new neighbours will be. Nor will Government divulge details about the proposed "second aluminium smelter", who wants to build it and where.
In a reply to emailed questions, NGC would only confirm what we knew all along, that with other "downstream industries" Alcoa was the proposed tenant at Chatham,. "However discussions with other investors are in progress", they added. The second smelter was undergoing a "feasibility" study and the size and location had not been finalised. "Investigations of other potential (industrial) sites along the southwest peninsula are ongoing", they said.
It is actually easier to find out what is happening on the roof of the world in Iceland than it is right here in Trinidad.
Efforts to extract signs, even the merest hint, of any physical planning by the Government for the rapid industrialisation of rural Trinidad and passing of environmental legislation protecting human heath and the environment-the Water and Air Pollution effluent Rules-were as rewarding as a skinny dip in Karahnjukar's icy reservoir.
Neither Energy Minister Eric Williams, nor Trade and Industry's Ken Valley, leader of Government business in Parliament, knew anything about either at a post-cabinet press conference a few weeks ago. I was told development would be "sustainable" and instructed by Valley to speak to the Environmental Management Authority (EMA).
I told him I had already done that and knew that, like me, the EMA where waiting to hear about the fate of the Water and Air Pollution Rules they had so painstakingly prepared.
Williams told me afterwards that the government "had to grow the country". He would not comment on the second aluminium smelter and dismissed our contribution to climate change as "a blip" compared to other countries, which I thought strange.
A few years ago I saw a map of the world, with vertical red columns rising from those countries with significant per capita contributions to global warming through carbon dioxide emissions. Two columns soared high above all the others-the USA column and the Trinidad and Tobago column.
In tomorrow's Express, MARK MEREDITH
meets Alcoa's President of Primary Metals Development
Randy Overbey and talks to him about aluminium's not so shiny side. He also attempts to find out if the icy blast blowing Chatham's way from Kárahnjúkar will, like one of that region's freezing rivers, be diverted somewhere different.