May 23, 2025 — Mere hours before he banged his gavel to adjourn this year’s session of the Alaska House of Representatives, Speaker Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham, introduced a bill to bar metals mining from the Bristol Bay watershed.
The measure, House Bill 233, would expand on the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2023 decision prohibiting permitting of the controversial Pebble Project in the region. The Biden administration action, which followed up on a process started in the Obama administration, invoked a rarely used provision on the Clean Water Act to prevent development of the huge open-pit copper and gold mine planned for the region upstream from salmon-rich Bristol Bay.
Edgmon’s bill would ban all metallic sulfide mining in the area designated as the Bristol Bay Fisheries Reserve, which encompasses state land in the Bristol Bay watershed.
Metallic sulfide mining, also known as hard-rock mining, is the type of mining that extracts elements like gold and copper from acid-generating rocks classified as sulfides. When these sulfides are processed, they commonly cause acid to drain out. It is a method distinct from placer mining, which sifts out metals from loose sediments. The copper and gold that would be produced at the Pebble project is held in sulfide ore and would be extracted through hard-rock mining.
The Bristol Bay Fisheries Reserve was established by the Legislature in 1972 to prevent oil and gas development in the region. The effort was led by Jay Hammond, who was president of the state Senate at the time. He later became governor.