Though few recognized it at the time, 2011 may mark a turning point for the era of building mega energy and mining projects around the world, according to experts. That year, a series of natural disasters energized civic resistance to giant projects. At the same time, alternative and renewable energy technologies have evolved as cheaper, safer options. And more traditional industrial projects that have moved forward have tended to be smaller scale.
In March 2011, an earthquake and tsunami destroyed the 41-year-old, 4,700-megawatt Fukishima Daiichi nuclear power station in northern Japan, one of the 15 largest nuclear electrical generating plants in the world.
Seven months later and 3,000 miles east, two more mega energy projects failed in India. Early in December a large group of farmers and activists, supported by a Himalayan state government’s concern about fisheries and flooding, barricaded access roads and shut down construction of the $1.6 billion, 2,000-megawatt Lower Subansiri hydropower dam on the border between Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. On December 31, 2011, along the Bay of Bengal coast in Tamil Nadu, Cyclone Thane wrecked the $2 billion Nagarjuna oil refinery as it was nearing completion. Operations at the hydropower dam and the refinery never resumed.
In the years since, a number of mines, mega power plants, and other huge industrial infrastructure projects have failed around the world. A series of ecological, social, market, and investment forces have aligned on six continents to foil industrial developers who want to tear at the Australian landscape for coal, drill through Arctic ice for oil, move villages out of Himalayan valleys for hydropower dams, scrape South American mountainsides for new mines, divert rivers in South Africa to cool power plants, clear forests to mine Alberta sands for oil, construct a new nuclear plant in South Carolina, and race across the countryside with new pipelines to transport liquid fuels.
There have always been big projects that failed, said Bent Flyvbjerg, professor of major program management at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School and a widely cited global authority on mega projects. What is different now is that we have many more mega projects, they are much bigger, and there are spectacular failures that are more visible.
Most of these trends are at work on the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would cross the Great Plains. The Nebraska Public Service Commission will decide on Monday whether to allow TransCanada to build the $8 billion, 1,179-mile project. The Keystone XL was introduced nine years ago at the start of the tarsands oil boom in Alberta, Canada. Its path has been blocked by intense political opposition that demanded the attention of two U.S. presidents.
Underlying the turbulence are some 21st century economic, ecological, and social trends that make building billion-dollar plus energy and mining projects more difficult and risky than before. The colossal scale of designing, engineering, and planning mega projects confounds construction schedules and cost assessments. The time between designing big industrial projects and their operation frequently is a decade or moresufficient time for market conditions to change. Virtually every mega construction project in the world, according to Flyvberg, is running overdue and over budget. That has made investors increasingly nervous.
I haven’t measured it yet, but there might be something new that is happening given the change in the weather and the change from a carbon-based economy to a renewable economy, said Flyvbjerg. Both of these trends have impacts on mega projects and failures.
And the Earth itself often hasn’t made big projects easy, with floods, droughts, storms, and earthquakes. A vicious Himalayan flood in Uttarakhand, India, in 2013 destroyed or severely damaged 10 big hydropower dams and killed between 6,000 and 30,000 people, according to government and science group estimates. The earthquake two years ago in Nepal severely damaged 14 hydropower dams.
As recently as 2010, in its Master Energy Plan, Bangladesh envisioned building 19 large coal-fired power plants by 2030 to power its textile-based export economy. Visible progress has been made on just one plant, near Rampal, but even that is the site of fierce protests over alleged land seizures and potential water and air pollution. Seven other projects, financed by Korean, Chinese, and Japanese investment banks, have been shelved entirely, largely due to rising costs and public opposition.
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