Hundreds -- even thousands -- of Central Florida jobs could be lost if environmentalists succeed in halting phosphate mining in the state, industry sources say.
Florida is one of the global leaders in producing phosphates, which are used in fertilizers and other chemical compounds. Four counties -- Polk, Hillsborough, Manatee and Hardee -- are rich sources for the material, and rely on mining giants Mosaic and CF Industries for good-paying jobs.
But environmentalists at the Sierra Club, contending that the industry is wreaking havoc on the landscape, won a court injunction blocking Mosaic's 11,000-acre mine extension near Fort Meade.
The Army Corps of Engineers says it will launch an 18-month environmental review to assess the impact of phosphate mining.
In newspaper ads this summer, Mosaic said it would have to lay off 200 workers if its expansion plans were scuttled. Statewide, the company has some 3,100 employees.
In late October, the company reached a temporary agreement with environmentalists to proceed with a scaled-down 200-acre project -- about four months' worth of work.
As debate rages over what, if any, environmental impact phosphate mining is having on Florida, the Florida Institute of Phosphate Research notes that the industry is already one of the most strictly regulated in the state.
Paul Clifford, executive director of the University of South Florida-run institute, says that environmentalists' complaints about water diversions, broken dams and sterile landscapes are overblown.
"The primary reason for the change (in water flows) is the change in weather patterns over three decades, as well as urbanization and other unrelated diversions of water," Clifford says.
Though they are large users of water, mines actually account for less than 10 percent of their regions' groundwater usage, researchers say.
Broken dams that released mining materials in the 1970s and 1990s have, Clifford said, become a thing of the past as stricter regulations tightened construction.
And institute research director Steve Richardson said that mines' clay-settling areas have great economic and agricultural potential.
"They're not wastelands. The soil is very fertile and potentially can be good agricultural land," he said.
In a potential boon to the environment, CF Industries has a multimillion-dollar demonstration project where water is sent to a temporary storage reservoir and then passed into a clay settling area, which acts as a wetland-like water filter.
Such settling ponds, which could have commercial and industrial applications, are being studied by the South Florida Water Management District.
Meanwhile, Mosaic told Sunshine State News that its industrial processes could be tapped as a biomass energy source to diversify the state's power grid and to create additional jobs.
Phosphate ore is found from 15 to 50 feet below the surface. Draglines -- or huge cranes that could easily hold several full-sized cars -- remove the top layer of soil, and scoop up the phosphate matrix. The material is put in a pit where high-pressure water guns create a slurry that is pumped to a processing plant.
Speaking about the mining jobs, Clifford said there was "real concern about layoffs" until the short-term agreement was signed in October.
Companies maintain that if mining is stopped at some future date, workers would be terminated -- perhaps as early as January. Environmentalists counter that work could be found elsewhere.
But hardscrabble counties like Hardee -- where phosphate companies own 120,000 acres -- can ill-afford to lose jobs that pay well above service-sector wage.
And it's not all about the jobs.
Adhering to state environmental regulations that require phosphate miners to reclaim each acre they mine, Mosaic told the Wall Street Journal last month that some 95 percent of the 30,000 acres it has reclaimed in the past decade have been converted to pasture land for more than 4,500 head of cattle.
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Contact Kenric Ward at kward@sunshinestatenews.com or at (772) 801-5341.
