The court denied the state’s attempt to bring the case directly to it without pursuing the complaint through the lower courts.

The proposed Pebble Mine is owned by Northern Dynasty Minerals and is a large undeveloped porphyry copper-molybdenum-gold deposit located in the Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska, USA. The mine is expected to have a mine life of at least 20 years, producing around 2.9Mt of copper, 136kt of molybdenum, 210t of gold, 1.05kt of silver as well as 200t of rhenium.

Despite the large volumes of critical minerals and the economic benefit that these will bring, the Pebble Project has been blighted by decades of protests and legal battles by locals and environmentalists. The potential negative environmental impact on the Bristol Bay ecosystem has been a major topic of debate.

Recently, the US Supreme Court dismissed Alaska’s attempt to keep the project alive after its development was halted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in January 2023. The EPA sided with parties opposing the proposed mine, citing that storing mine waste in the Bristol Bay watershed would have adverse effects on the local sockeye salmon population (home to the world’s largest population of sockeye salmon) as well as other wildlife. The decision by the US Supreme Court to decline to review the challenge by Alaska against the EPA effectively upholds the ruling by the EPA in 2023.

After years of protracted legal challenges and resistance by environmentalists and locals, Northern Dynasty appears to face an uphill challenge to bring the Pebble Mine online. Demand for critical minerals such as copper, molybdenum and rhenium will continue to grow year-on-year. The Pebble Project could have been a valuable source of these metals, helping to stabilise North American copper, molybdenum and rhenium supply chains for the next two decades. Despite the economic benefit offered by the Pebble Project, the potential risks to the local wildlife could not be overlooked by authorities. This case highlights the tradeoff faced between securing domestic supply security of critical minerals and the environmental considerations of fragile ecosystems.