Guatemala greenlights open cast mining at Cerro Blanco despite environmental warnings

Guatemala this month authorized Canadian company Bluestone Resources to carry out open pit mining at its Cerro Blanco asset rather than as an underground operation, despite warnings from environmentalists that it could contaminate water sources in both Guatemala and in El Salvador.

Bluestone reported in a statement that Guatemala's environment and natural resources ministry (MARN) “approved modifying the environmental permit for the Cerro Blanco gold project, to change the mining method from underground development to open pit development.”

“The Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM) has also updated, by way of resolution, the Project’s approved mining license to reflect the environmental permit amendment and the change to the surface mining method,” added the company, which asked to change the environmental permit in November 2021.

The Vancouver-based company, which has owned the project since 2017, noted that “while aspects of the Project layout increased in size, fundamental design characteristics remain unchanged, including the processing plant, dry stack tailings, water management, infrastructure, and facilities.”

The initial capex for Cerro Blanco was put at US$572m.

Newspaper Diario La Prensa Gráfica recalled that in February 2022, the Central American alliance against mining (Acafremin) stated that the changes requested by Bluestone “go from processing 1,000t/d of material to processing 10,952t/d and extracting 3.31Mt of material in a 73.4km tunnel to extracting 144.8Mt in pits with a depth of up to 370m and 1,200m long.”

“All this material subsequently becomes waste that is deposited on hills that will generate acid drainage and dust that is harmful to health,” Acafremin stated. It is one of several environmental organizations that has made repeated claims that the mine is a risk to both Guatemala and El Salvador.

The gold project is located in Jutiapa department southeast Guatemala, approximately 9km west of the border with El Salvador and 160km by road from Guatemala City.

With an estimated initial mine life of 14 years, Bluestone's plan is to produce 347,000oz/y of gold at peak production and it has already completed the feasibility study.

Environmentalists have pointed out that the mine will dump waste in the Ostúa river, which borders Lake Güija and the Angue de Metapán river, which is a tributary of the Lempa river, El Salvador's biggest waterway.

Acafremin states that “open pit mining is ... much more aggressive for the environment and dangerous for human health,” and suggested that Bluestone's request to modify the environmental permit was a “new attempt” to “bend Guatemala's environmental laws and avoid carrying out the due process that implies, among other things, conducting a broad consultation in the communities that would be directly affected by this change.

Due to these concerns, in September 2022, more than 7,400 residents of Asunción Mita rejected the construction of this and other mining projects in a public consultation carried out by the municipal mayor's office. However, the MEM ignored the results, arguing that the process was carried out in contravention of the law and, furthermore, it had already been provisionally suspended by a court.