The IAC Hearing was initially scheduled to start in February. However Kalbar’s admission in mid-January that they had seriously overestimated their ability to recover water during processing led to them proposing to use centrifuges to make up for the almost 3GL underestimates of water needed in their modelling. The centrifuge proposal meant massive changes to the proposal that made much (if not most) of the original EES documentation irrelevant or worthless.
Kalbar’s mistakes led to delays in the hearing and the need for all parties to organise supplementary reports from their experts and many problems for legal teams who had been hired with the original timetable in mind.
Submitters were given the opportunity to comment on the centrifuge proposal however there was a lot of angst about the limited time available for lay people to research the proposal .
Despite the overwhelming evidence that centrifuges were not a viable option for mineral sands mines, the IAC panel also agreed to allow Kalbar to restrict their case to consideration of centrifuges only which they claimed would obviate the need for a Tailings Storage Facility. (Some argued that the IAC’s decision reflected their lack of mining and engineering experience and there was great concern that should the mine be approved Kalbar would have immediately admitted the centrifuges were both impractical and unviable and would need to revert to a TSF that had not been the subject of any scrutiny.)
The actual hearings went over 10 weeks from May 3rd to July 22nd. Over that time another 783 additional documents were submitted to the Panel. Closing submissions were heard in Week 10.
The following pages give all documentation and recordings for every week of the hearing. We strongly recommend you read expert and submitter statements prior to listening to the recordings