After asserting that imposing an environmental assessment process on Northvolt similar to other large industrial projects would have driven the company away, Quebec Environment Minister Benoit Charette argued Wednesday that the province must consider itself lucky to welcome this company, which will receive billions of dollars in public funds to carry out its project.
“We can consider ourselves privileged and lucky, because he is a very good student from an environmental point of view. And he is a student who will help us achieve our decarbonization objectives, particularly in terms of transport,” argued the CAQ minister in an interview with All one morningon ICI Première.
Mr. Charette above all defended the Legault government’s decision not to subject the battery “giga-factory” to the same environmental procedure as that imposed for several years on other large industrial projects wishing to set up in Quebec.
This procedure would have forced Northvolt to carry out an impact study which would have provided an overview of the environmental, social and economic issues of the most important industrial project in recent decades. The project would then have been submitted to an examination by the Bureau d’audiences publique sur l’environnement (BAPE), an independent body that has existed since 1978 and whose mandate is to make recommendations to the government.
” Race “
However, the minister claims that this environmental procedure would have literally driven away the company, which could receive more than seven billion dollars in public funds for the realization of its project. “It is certain that they would have chosen another place to set up,” he said, adding that the whole process would have taken at least 18 months, while Quebec is engaged, according to him, in “a race on a global scale to implement these projects.
It is true that at the time of submitting the application for authorization to destroy wetlands and wooded areas on its land, at the beginning of September 2023, Northvolt hoped to have completed this stage before the end of 2023. We are now six months away later, 60,000 m2 wetlands have been destroyed and the company is awaiting authorization to construct the first buildings of its factory. We hope to begin production in 2026, but for the moment, we do not know the details of the next steps, including the pumping system and discharge of water into the Richelieu River.
Benoit Charette, however, reaffirmed that the environmental procedure which would have led to the BAPE, which was modified in the weeks preceding the announcement of the project, was not modified to accommodate Northvolt. “I never helped the company avoid a BAPE,” he assured All one morning. “We have adapted the regulations to implement this sector which is necessary from a strictly environmental point of view,” added the minister.
Prior to regulatory changes implemented in 2023 as the company worked toward the project announcement, the Northvolt industrial complex would have been subject to the process as a “chemical manufacturing” plant. But Quebec has created a separate category for factories related to “energy storage equipment”. It is in this category that the BAPE threshold increases from 50,000 tonnes to 60,000 tonnes.
“Quebec did not have regulations to encourage the establishment of a battery sector. This is what we have developed over the last year, but in no way with the aim of favoring one company to the detriment of another. And never with the aim of circumventing or avoiding the regulations to avoid a BAPE. You must not make me say what I did not say,” argued Minister Charette.
“There was no preferential treatment granted to Northvolt, no privileges and no political pressure,” insisted the minister.
Biodiversity
The Minister of the Environment also repeated that the Northvolt site is former “industrial land”, that Northvolt protects “places of biodiversity of interest” and that the company has implemented measures “to ensure that biodiversity can develop.”
The reports from his ministry’s experts produced as part of the analysis of the request for the destruction of wetlands and wooded areas by Northvolt nevertheless indicate that the project will have significant impacts on fauna and flora.
The “loss” of more than 950,000 m2 of natural environments on the site literally constitutes a point of no return for the biodiversity of the sector, according to what we can read in an analysis transmitted following a request for access to information. Indeed, the experts underline, the surface area of “residual” natural environments would “not be sufficient to maintain the essential functions supporting local and regional wildlife biodiversity, in this case avian fauna, turtles and bats”.
They specify at the same time that “the project site is a massif of natural environments” of great “diversity” which “give it an interest for fauna, including more than 142 species of birds and numerous species in situation precarious (14 species of birds, 4 species of bats as well as 3 species of turtles)”.
Another document produced by the Quebec Ministry of the Environment in October also underlines the “high ecological value” of the site, which is “one of the rare residual natural environments” in the region and one of the last which allows a link between terrestrial environments and the Richelieu River.
Northvolt also says it absolutely needs water from the Richelieu River to operate its future factory, but the Species at Risk Act risks blocking this crucial stage of the project. This federal law very strictly protects the habitat of the copper redhorse, an endangered species of fish. The site also still contains thousands of tons of contaminated soil.