Carbon offsetting not possible at Faro mine cleanup in Yukon, feds say

It won't be possible to offset the significant emissions caused by the Faro mine site clean-up in the Yukon, according to the federal government.

In a document filed to the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board (YESAB), the government calls the board's recommendations for carbon offsetting at Faro "aspirational, but ultimately not feasible to execute" due to lack of technology and available offset protocols.

Once the largest open pit lead-zinc mine in the world, the Faro site was abandoned in 1998. It's now one of Canada's most contaminated sites, containing 260 million tonnes of waste rock. The mine's cleanup is expected to take 15 years and will produce a "significant magnitude" of emissions, according to YESAB. 

The board recommended in a draft screening report published last February that the cleanup could go ahead if all emissions were offset. It suggested using electric vehicles, planting trees and purchasing carbon offset credits to mitigate emissions.

The remediation project is being led by Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC), which responded to the board's proposal on April 19.

According to CIRNAC, there aren't any approved offset protocols that are relevant to the Yukon, nor are there any private offsetting projects that could be purchased in the territory's ecosystem. It also says that developing its own offsetting project would require a forest management plan controlling thousands of hectares – which would require significant assessment time and further delay the clean-up project.

Heavy-duty electric vehicles without major charge and power limitations are also not commercially available, the federal government says. Even if they were available, there isn't a renewable energy source at the required scale near the mine site in central Yukon to power them, and building infrastructure would require a whole new assessment process.

CIRNAC has proposed an emissions reduction plan instead of carbon offsetting, to be written after receiving a water licence and updated every five years. 

It also says that technology is "rapidly evolving" and more opportunities for carbon offsetting might appear over the next decade.

'A bit of a cop-out'

The government isn't wrong to say protocols and regulations for carbon offsetting don't exist yet, according to Alex Tavasoli, a sustainability expert at the University of British Columbia. But she said that doesn't mean the government shouldn't try to overcome those challenges.

The tension between creating emissions to clean up environmental disasters isn't going anywhere, and Tavasoli argues that Canada should work to address it. Until then, the government is going to repeatedly face the same environmental trade-offs, she says.

Carbon offsetting is still new, and regulations are trying to catch up to the research, Tavasoli said. She says that while some privatized carbon offset projects exist, many of them don't work as well as they claim and that makes accountability guidelines necessary. 

Still, the government's total rejection of offsetting seems like "a bit of a cop-out," Tavasoli says.

"If the government was really excited about doing this in the right way, it could use this as an example project to stretch those regulations and try some of them out," Tavasoli said.

Lewis Rifkind, the Yukon Conservation Society's mining analyst, says it's disappointing that Faro won't be a flagship project for carbon offsetting. He's concerned that the government's stance could discourage mining companies from attempting to build carbon offsetting into future plans.

"They've got lots of money, they've got no real hidden agenda, you'd think this could be a poster project for them," Rifkind said. "You'd think the feds would try harder."