From now on the company can complete its environmental impact...

From now on the company can complete its environmental impact study, a document that together with the exploitation project, the restoration project and the economic feasibility of the intervention will integrate the information that has to be delivered to the general direction of Mines of the Junta de Extremadura when the company asks for the concession permit for the exploitation of the deposit.The document delivered this Friday by the counseling to the company is one more of a procedure that will still last for months and that will have to go through a period of public information in which there will be thousands of allegations. Its importance lies in the fact that it is a first approach to assess the project in environmental matters. It is not definitive, that that will be the evaluation that is made of the environmental impact study, but it does allow an interpretation by the company that with that document it is being told that its project is viable.The first to report on the delivery of the scope document was the Ministry for the Ecological Transition in a statement released in the early afternoon of this Friday. The counseling does not make any interpretation, it only explains the procedure that has been followed and in the end affirms that with this document the promoting company will be able to "prepare and present an environmental impact study" with the considerations made in the scope report. The company's valuation came three quarters of an hour later. Neither the Board nor the company have made public the content of this scope document.Last March, the company received the exploration permit granted by the Board to prove that there is lithium in the Valdeflores site. With this permit, the door is opened so that the company can request the exploitation permit or the pass from the exploration permit to concession to exploit the deposit, which is the decisive thing to be able to excavate or not. To request that concession, the company needs to deliver an environmental impact study and to write it, the Board was asked in September to prepare a scope document, which is the one that has been delivered today.The director of ENE, Ramón Jiménez, calculated this Friday, to questions from this newspaper, that before August it could be presented in the general direction of Minas both the results of the exploration, to confirm the presence of lithium, and all the necessary documentation to qualify for exploitation.He explained that the company's interpretation that the scope document supports the viability of his project is made "because there is no insurmountable comment (...) none is serious, most of them are clarifications and nuances" that in some cases "we had already taken into account." "We have not seen comments that tell us that we have made a mistake nor have we seen anything that worries us," he said. Regarding the observations made by the city council that extractive uses are not allowed in Valdeflores, the director of the company reiterated that there are judicial resolutions in which it is concluded that this prohibition of the urban planning plan is not applicable "when the activity is carried out in the subsoil without affecting the surface."In its initial study, the mining company proposed three possible locations, the one that has "fewer points against" is the one planned in the vicinity of the Miajadas road, "it is the one that would have the least environmental impact," according to the company's director. The option of the three alternatives that will be proposed in the environmental impact study is the one in the vicinity of the Ex-206 regional highway.What will have to be included by the company in the environmental impact study is one of the considerations that the city council makes in the report that it sent to the Board to prepare the scope document. In that report it is recalled that for the location next to the Ex-206 it is necessary to "justify in a concrete and detailed way its possible condition" on the Calerizo, since this alternative is located on it, and "the measures adopted."Check here all the news from CáceresRegarding the fall in the price of lithium during 2023, Jiménez insisted that it does not affect the viability of the Valdeflores project, "it was something that could be seen coming," he said, recalling that it has reached 85,000 euros per ton. In the "most pessimistic" projections, it will be placed at an average price "between 30,000 and 35,000 euros per ton," he predicted, a cost that would still be above the calculation of 17,000 euros per ton that was made when the feasibility of the underground mine in Cáceres was assessed