An Australian planning watchdog on Wednesday blocked the development of a large South Korean-owned coal mine, citing concerns about long-lasting “environmental impacts” that would hurt future generations.<\/p>\n
Korean electricity giant KEPCO proposed the mine for New South Wales’ Bylong Valley — a four-hour drive northwest of Sydney — promising more than 2,000 jobs and an Aus$300 million (US$205 million) boost to the economy.<\/p>\n
The project was slated to produce 120 million tonnes of coal over the next 25 years, the latest large-scale coal project in Australia — a leading global exporter.<\/p>\n
But New South Wales’ Independent Planning Commission struck the project down, saying the impact on groundwater was “unacceptable” and that there was no evidence supporting KEPCO’s environmental rehabilitation claims.<\/p>\n
The Korea Electric Power Corporation is by far the country’s largest electric utility.<\/p>\n
The watchdog said that it was unfair for current generations to reap the benefits of a project that would leave the environmental costs to be “borne by the future generations.” The commission added that “greenhouse gas aspects” of the burning of coal “remain problematic”.<\/p>\n
It was not immediately clear if KEPCO would appeal the decision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An Australian planning watchdog on Wednesday blocked the development of a large South Korean-owned coal mine, citing concerns about long-lasting “environmental impacts” that would hurt future generations. Korean electricity giant KEPCO proposed the mine for New South Wales’ Bylong Valley — a four-hour drive northwest of Sydney — promising more than 2,000 jobs and an Aus$300 million (US$205 million) boost to the economy. The project was slated to produce 120 million tonnes of coal over the next 25 years, the latest large-scale coal project in Australia — a leading global exporter. But New South Wales’ Independent Planning Commission struck the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[131],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-292549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}