Cepa ends inspection for Ramu NiCo mine

The National Business

THE 2018 annual environmental regulatory compliance inspection by the Conservation and Environment Protection Authority (Cepa) for the Ramu nickel/cobalt project in Madang was completed last Friday.
The inspection covered Ramu NiCo project’s Basamuk processing site, the 135km slurry pipeline and the Kurumbukari mine.
Ramu NiCo (MCC) mine said in a statement that the objective of the Cepa annual inspection was to check the operational compliance of the mine to the environment permit conditions and the fulfilment of the approved operational environmental management programme (OEMP).
The inspection was conducted by Cepa manager mining Robert Sine from December 19-21.
Sine clarified that as part of the reporting requirement under the environment permit (EP), MCC submitted regular monitoring reports to Cepa on a timely basis.
Some of these reports submitted to Cepa in 2018 included:

  • Quarterly environmental performance report;
  • monthly tailings characterisation reports;
  • biannual stream chemistry report;
  • fresh water fauna survey report; and,
  • Marine survey report, which covers deep-sea and near-shore marine environment.

Sine said an incident report was also submitted to Cepa regarding a slurry pipeline leakage mid this year.
The problem had been rectified accordingly.
According to Cepa, MCC had come a long way from its early days to improve its environmental compliance level significantly.
That is attributed to the huge financial investment and man-hours spent at the Basamuk processing site and the Kurumbukari mine to improve its operations to be compliant to its permit conditions.
Sine praised MCC, citing a recent example during a deep sea marine survey which was conducted in September 2018, where the company spent in the excess of K2.4 million.
He said the timely submission of monitoring reports showed that actual monitoring work had been conducted, samples analysed and reports submitted to Cepa as required.
Sine said the last major audit by Cepa was conducted in 2015 by an independent consultant.
Corrective actions have been implemented over three years and were completed successfully last month.
Sine said the next major environment audit was planned for next year. Major environment audits by Cepa are conducted every three years. Cepa concluded after the inspection that MCC had complied to its environmental regulatory requirements in its reporting.
A major operational audit will be conducted by Cepa in the middle of next year.