Google Earth Community: Digging up lignite

The Mae Moh Power Plant and lignite mine in Thailand's northern Lampang province, and what the locals think of it.

This 135-square-kilometre mine, Thailand's largest, produces something on the order of 40,000 tonnes of lignite per day which the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (Egat) uses to fuel its thermal power plants, including the one here, Southeast Asia's largest coal-fired plant. The mine keeps getting the state agency into trouble.

In July 2007 a court revoked its licence based on the discovery here two years ago of a large cluster of 13-million-year-old mollusc fossils. Egat was ordered to conduct an environmental impact assessment and enclose the fossil area with a retaining wall, and the government's Fine Arts Department was told to register the site as an historic area.

The fossil site, 300 by 230 metres and 12 metres deep, holds the fossils of freshwater snails and is the only one of its kind in the world. Sites in Austria and Australia containing prehistoric sea mollusc fossils have been designated World Heritage sites.

The court's ruling, answering a 2005 petition by residents of Mae Moh village adjacent to the lignite plant, is the latest setback for Egat, which has been at odds with the local citizenry since the 1980s. The residents now plan to build an environmental study centre near the mollusc "cemetery" to provide information about both the freshwater snails and their battles with Egat.

Egat acknowledges that the mining and power generation here affected the environment and the community's quality of life. Its website says that, since 1980, 2,389 villagers have been resettled on land suitable for housing and farming. It also admits that a problem immediately arose because the displaced villagers received no land title deeds, but these were eventually issued. It says it set up a fund in 2000 to pay for "educational development, vocational promotion, public health, the development of public facilities and the enhancement of the environment".

Greenpeace is unimpressed, arguing that some 1.6 million tonnes of sulphur gas is released into the air from the power plant annually, "resulting in severe health problems for local people and irreversible damage to the natural environment". It calls the facility Southeast Asia's "biggest contributor to climate change" and blames it for the deaths of nearly 300 people.

Since operations commenced here, Greenpeace says, "more than 30,000 people have been displaced, thousands have experienced severe respiratory problems and four lawsuits have been filed against Egat", and "the villagers continue to suffer".

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