Revised EIA/EIS has been submitted and is currently under review by CEAA

On March 29, 2018, Alberta Transportation submitted an updated Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to provide the additional information requested by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA).

In November 2017, CEAA had cited 24 areas where the original EIS submission did not conform to the specific requirements outlined in their Guideline for the Preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement pursuant to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, 2012 for the Springbank Off-stream Reservoir Project.

Does this “restart the clock”?

With the additional information now in-hand, the CEAA has a maximum of 30 calendar days to complete a conformity review and these 30 days are not counted against the federal timeline for the environmental assessment itself, being one year overall. Assuming no conformity issues, the federal timeline for the technical environmental assessment review will commence on the following day. The overall time allocated for the CEAA to review the EIA will then remain the same and the “clock” will restart on that process on that date. The CEAA has 365 days from the Notice of Commencement of an Environmental Assessment to complete its review.

The revised submission includes a concordance table outlining where the additional information requested by the CEAA can be found in the updated March 2018 EIS. You can access all documents here:

• Preface to March 2018 EIS, including Concordance Table to the November 16, 2017 Letter from CEAA.
• The full EIS can be found on the Alberta Environmental and Parks website at ftp://ftp.gov.ab.ca/env/fs/eia/2017-10-AlbertaTransportationSpringbankOffStreamReservoirProject/

 
The application for the Springbank Project is also subject to a provincial environmental impact assessment process by Alberta Environment and Parks and a regulatory review process by the Natural Resources Conservation Board, which will likely hold public hearings once the application is deemed technically complete.

The anticipated schedule for the Project is included in the EIS (Volume 1 at page 1.7).

If you have any questions regarding this information, please reach out to us at info@crcactiongroup.ca. 

Regards,

Your CRCAG Board