Toronto-based Barrick Gold plans to launch a massive mining project 15,000 feet high in the Andes that calls for moving portions of three glaciers and extracting 17.5 million ounces of gold.

Called Pascua Lama, the border-straddling, US$1.5 billion open-pit mine proposed for Argentina’s San Juan province and Chile’s Third Region would be Barrick’s biggest new investment. The world’s third largest gold producer expects construction to begin by year’s end, once final regulatory hurdles are cleared.

Pascua Lama would be the first project to make use of a treaty ratified by the two nations in 2000 that allows workers and machinery involved in cross-border mining operations to move freely over the international boundary.

However, opposition to the mine is growing—particularly in Chile, where the country’s Congress has recently held public hearings on the project. In June, some 2,000 environmentalists, farmers and Diaguita Indians marched in Santiago and the northern town of Vallenar, near the proposed project site.

The opposition focuses partly on Barrick’s plans to move portions of three glaciers—Toro I, Toro II and Esperanza—that help irrigate the Huasco Valley in Chile’s Third Region.

Barrick insists such work has succeeded in other locations, such as the Kumtor mine in Kyrgyzstan. The company says the ice will be broken with hydraulic hammers and deposited on a fourth glacier nearby. It reports the ice to be moved amounts to 1% of the three glaciers—a change, it insists, that is within the range of natural fluctuations in the size of glaciers.

Water-supply worries

Environmentalists charge that even if only small portions of Toro I, Toro II and Esperanza are disturbed, down-slope areas that depend on water from the glaciers still might be harmed.

They also question Barrick’s plan to use sodium cyanide to extract gold from ore. The cyanide-leach process requires large amounts of water and generates toxic waste that, if not properly contained, can foul water sources.

Green groups say such risks are magnified by the mine’s size and its location in a seismically active area. The company counters that it will carefully contain its tailings in a 1.5-square-mile (four-sq-km), polyethylene-lined holding pond, but critics aren’t reassured.

“You can read their technical arguments until you’re blue in the face, but there’s no foolproof way to guarantee accidents won’t happen in such a seismically active area,” says environmental scientist Raúl Montenegro, president of the Argentine group Foundation for Defense of the Environment (Funam).

Pascua Lama won initial regulatory approval in 2001 in Chile and Argentina. It was subsequently shelved, but Barrick resumed design work last year and expanded the project’s scope amid a surge in gold prices. A review of the revised environmental-impact assessment, now underway at the provincial level in Argentina and the regional level in Chile, is expected to conclude soon.

While Argentine authorities so far appear to back Pascua Lama unequivocally, their Chilean counterparts have questioned Barrick. In May, Chile’s National Environmental Commission (Conama) asked the company to comment on the possibility of doing below-ground mining rather than digging an open-pit mine and moving glacial ice. Barrick is studying the matter, but has said it doesn’t consider such a strategy feasible or necessary.

Barrick prepares ground

With nearly 20% of its global reserves on the line, Barrick is not taking a passive public approach. In May, the company launched a campaign plugging the project on Chilean TV. It also has created a foundation to promote health care and education in the Third Region and endowed it with a US$10 million donation.

Says Vince Borg, Barrick’s vice president for corporate communications: “If you don’t deal with the public’s concerns up front, it can explode in your face.”

The company also has engaged Chilean farmers concerned the mine will reduce and pollute water supplies. On June 30, it struck a deal with a group representing 3,000 farmers, Junta de Vigilancia, agreeing to pay $US 60 million over 20 years to offset potential impacts and to study ways to ensure the project doesn’t diminish local water supplies.

Recently, that agreement has drawn criticism. Dissenting farmers and one of Junta de Vigilancia’s directors are working to get their organization to renounce the accord. Meanwhile, the Latin American Environmental Conflicts Observatory (Olca), a Chilean nonprofit, has gathered signatures aimed at persuading Chilean President Ricardo Lagos to oppose the project. Olca researcher César Padilla doubts a definitive decision will be made on Pascua Lama during the current run-up to Chile’s Dec. 11 presidential election.

“The company and its supporters in the government know that without defusing the opposition, they can’t approve it because the project is not environmentally sound,” Padilla says. “I suspect the government wants to wait until after the election before it deals with this.”