Road versus rail in the Ring of Fire

Shawn Bell - Wawatay News

With the Ontario government now acknowledging that the north-south access road into the Ring of Fire is solely going to be for industrial users – “for developers to go in and get ore and minerals back out”, as a government spokesperson said – it is time to look at whether a road is actually in the best interests of the north.

The debate over which way a Ring of Fire road should go, either north-south or east-west, framed much of the transportation conversation around the development over the past few years. Certain First Nations chiefs expressed their skepticism that any road would ever be accessible for local people anyways, but their voices were generally ignored amid all the optimism around connecting communities to the highway system.

Then, earlier this year, the east-west road corridor that was proposed to connect Webequie, Wunnumin, Nibinamik and Neskantaga to Pickle Lake via a highway was blown out of the water. Ontario came out in support of Cliffs’ north-south road proposal, seemingly without any debate over the merits of choosing north-south rather than east-west, but in reality with a decision based solely on cost. The east-west road’s main proponent, Noront Resources, changed its tune and decided that the north-south road is fine for its purposes too. Lost in the hubbub were the voices of the chiefs who had called for the east-west road to connect their communities. Ontario had showed clearly that it was much more interested in doing what was best for its big American mining ally than it was in helping First Nations meet their needs.

Now that any last hopes of using the Ring of Fire road to connect First Nations to the highway system seem to be gone, the very idea of building a road should be put up to consideration.

In Cliffs’ proposal, the company estimates it will have to move 2.3 million tones of chromite out of its mine site per year, along the estimated 350 kilometre road. Considering that an average nine-axel tractor-trailer has a carrying capacity of 46 tonnes, it is going to take somewhere around 50,000 truck-loads per year to move the ore south. A rough calculation shows that will be 140 trips each way over the road per day.

The effects of that much truck traffic are considerable, especially when taking into account the estimated 250 trips each way per year that a railway would need to make.

Numerous reports have clearly demonstrated the increased environmental impact of shipping by truck compared to rail. Trucks emit greater carbon dioxide, greater nitrous oxide and greater sulfur dioxide than rail. One report on the environmental effects of freight prepared for the OECD Joint Session of Trade and Environmental experts, for example, found that shipping by truck has four times the impact on global warming than shipping by rail.

Besides the pollution caused by running that many trucks up and down the Ring of Fire access road, the impact on wildlife will also be severe. If the estimate of 140 truck trips each way per day is accurate, a point along the road will see a truck pass approximately every five minutes. There is the potential for a lot of wildlife accidents with that much traffic travelling through untouched boreal forest.

Add to that the fact that the above calculations are based simply on Cliffs’ estimates. Start factoring Noront into the road’s use, the effects of road versus rail get that much worse. And it is widely accepted that these two projects are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to mining in the Ring of Fire. The road versus rail debate is bigger than Cliffs.

Cliffs acknowledges that the environmental affects of using road to transport ore are much greater than rail. In its EA, the company states that “from an environmental perspective, transporting concentrate using conventional truck and trailer configurations along a dedicated all-weather access road provides few inherent advantages in comparison to rail haul. Increased traffic volumes on the proposed access road is likely to increase wildlife/traffic conflicts (more so than rail), result in increased noise and air pollution, and associated impacts on climate change. However, the transport of concentrate from the Mine Site to a Base Case Transload Facility using the all-weather access road and trucks is significantly less costly, improving the economic viability of the project.”

Ontario has refused to consider transportation options that would have connected First Nations to the grid, and is now planning to limit who can use the road it is planning to help build, all in the name of helping a multi-billion dollar company get its project off the ground. The minimum that the decision makers can do now is mitigate the environmental effects of the transportation corridor. If local people cannot use the infrastructure being built, at least the local environment should not have to needlessly suffer too.