The Laotian government has approved a plan to develop a lignite mine and built a power plant in the Hongsa Valley, an area near the habitat of an important elephant population. Environmentalists and experts fear this will drive the pachyderms closer to extinction.

Vientiane (AsiaNews/Agencies) – A new lignite mine and a power station are slated for construction in Hongsa Valley (Sayaboury province), a natural habitat for elephants that is irreplaceable. Both facilities will be close to the village of Hongsa, which this year held the Third Sayaboury Elephant Festival, attracting more than 80,000 visitors. Elephant training is a traditional activity in this region and during this year’s festival 70 or so jumbos were by turns applauded, photographed and simply adored as they strutted their stuff like divas. Local artisans and merchants also benefitted from the annual influx of visitors. However, just a few kilometres away the authorities plan to build the Hongsa Thermal Power Plant Project, a big power plant to be fuelled by locally extracted lignite.

Lignite is the least efficient fossil fuel. It is dirty, so heavy in sulphur, carbon and water that often the only effective way of getting energy from its source is to process the lignite at the mine's mouth. Otherwise, the cost of transporting the coal often makes it uneconomic compared with other energy sources. Overall, the new plant is expected to cover a 12 square kilometre area.

Thai energy company Banpu PCL in association with other partners should complete the plan  with a US$ 100 million loan from the Chinese Import-Export and Development Bank.

“There seems to be little comprehension of the consequences . . . from building this power plant,” said Sebastien Duffillot, programme manager of ElefantAsia, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that provides technical assistance to Laos' Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock.

“To run a safe and environmentally clean lignite mine these days costs a fortune. [. . .] The modern approach would be to leave it in the ground and go with renewables,” Steve Raines, a coal mining engineer in Woollongong, New South Wales, is quoted as saying in the Asia Times.

The area has already suffered extensively from logging. With their habitat shrinking, there would be little for elephants to do or eat.

Already air monitoring in Mae Moh, near Lampang in northern Thailand, found excessive levels of sulphur dioxide because of local lignite mining and power generation. This is causing significant health problems in the surrounding community.

A 2002 Greenpeace study showed how the Mae Moh Power Plant annually produces 4.4 million tonnes of fly ash along with 39 tonnes of the neurotoxin mercury. A lignite mine on the scale proposed for Hongsa would produce more than is possible to capture, experts say.

It is also likely that the adjacent river Kene, a source of fresh water and fish for nearby villages, would suffer contamination from pollutants spewed out by the plant. Inorganic mercury, present in a lignite mine's fly ash, when deposited in soil and fresh water can be converted into a very potent and poisonous neurotoxin affecting both soil and living organisms.

This is generating a great deal of gear because elephants are highly vulnerable to pollution, and the mine and power plant “may just kill a lot of the remaining herds,” said Richard Lair, one of the world's leading experts on Asian elephants.

The pachyderms are also threatened by farmers, who often kill the animals because of their devastating impact on plantations where sugar cane and other plants are grown and which they love to eat.

Elephants are already highly endangered in Laos. For every live birth there are about ten deaths, with many perishing due to lack of care or disease.

There are estimated to be only 10 to 14 elephants below 10 years in the country. If replacement is not soon achieved by breeding programmes—one of ElefantAsia's goals—the species will soon be extinct in Laos, a country known as the “land of a million elephants”.

• laos
• hongsba
• kene
• river
• mae
• moh
• elephants
• lignite
• mine
• power
• plant
• pollution