Twelve Oeste Councils Reject the Serra d'El-Rei Kaolin Mine, and Say Its Impact Study Puts Homes Four Kilometres Away When Some Stand at Twenty Metres

The twelve municipalities of Portugal's Oeste region have formally turned against the open-pit kaolin and clay mine planned for Serra d'El-Rei, in the Peniche council area, and have asked the Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente (Portuguese Environment Agency) to refuse it outright.

Meeting on Thursday, the council of the Comunidade Intermunicipal do Oeste (West Intermunicipal Community), known as OesteCIM, resolved to take an "unfavourable position" on the project, which it judged "incompatible with the environmental and territorial carrying capacity of the surrounding area and with the region's sustainable development model". The body wants a Declaração de Impacto Ambiental (Environmental Impact Statement) issued against the scheme. Although the concession sits inside Peniche, the twelve councils argue that "the effects of the project are not confined to municipal boundaries".

OesteCIM was careful about what it is objecting to. "What is at issue is not extractive activity, but this project in this location, with this dimension, this duration and the technical basis on which it rests."

A four-kilometre gap that is twenty metres

The sharpest finding concerns the developer's own paperwork. The Avaliação de Impacto Ambiental (Environmental Impact Assessment) places the workings four kilometres from the nearest dwellings. The councils of Peniche and Óbidos had already flagged this, and OesteCIM repeats it: there are houses at 450 metres, at 150 metres and at 20 metres.

Distance is not a detail here. It is the input that drives every calculation of noise, dust, atmospheric emissions, vibration and public health. Getting it wrong by that margin, the intermunicipal body says, means the assessment "does not offer a secure basis for evaluating impacts" and "prevents a properly reasoned environmental decision".

The assessment itself acknowledges suspended particulates and noise across the twenty years of working, along with 72 species of vascular flora, cork oaks and 50 species of terrestrial vertebrates, some of them threatened.

Water, lorries and twelve jobs

The twelve councils also raised the risk to the region's water. There are 24 groundwater abstraction points and the Albufeira de São Domingos (São Domingos reservoir) in the surrounding area, and the project includes an industrial sand-washing unit that will consume water and produce effluent. They are asking for a detailed hydrological and hydrogeological study demonstrating that watercourses are not at risk.

Traffic is the other practical objection. At eleven lorries an hour, the councils expect "significant" changes on a road network built for light vehicles, with consequences for road safety, pavement condition and quality of life. They want a heavy-vehicle circulation plan drawn up at intermunicipal scale.

Against all of that, the mayors set the project's stated benefit: twelve direct jobs. Their conclusion is that the environmental and infrastructure costs exceed the economic return, and that mitigation cannot fix "a project whose impacts arise from its own location, dimension and duration". Open-pit extraction, they add, means a "profound and lasting alteration" of the terrain that final restoration will not undo.

What the project actually is

The concession, named Royal China Clay, covers 101 hectares in the freguesia of Serra d'El-Rei and has been granted by the State for two decades to Motamineral, Minerais Industriais, S.A. Within it, three cores account for 51.4 hectares of actual extraction, producing around 569,100 tonnes a year: roughly 31,800 tonnes of kaolin, 270,000 of washed sand and 267,300 of common clay.

The public consultation drew 1,655 submissions before it closed on 1 September, and we covered the state of the opposition at that point. Since then the list has lengthened: the environmental association Quercus, the Associação Portuguesa dos Arquitetos Paisagistas (Portuguese Association of Landscape Architects) and the councils of Peniche, Óbidos and Bombarral have all filed against it. Quercus has been running a parallel campaign against the renewal of the Panasqueira mine licence.

On Thursday evening the mayor of Peniche, Filipe de Matos Sales, said he would seek meetings with the Environment Minister and with the Environment Agency. The Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc) has tabled a written parliamentary question asking the minister what the project is actually worth to the region in jobs and social return.

The decision now rests with the Environment Agency, which has to issue the statement one way or the other. If it does clear the project, OesteCIM wants the cartography and distances corrected and validated first, along with a reassessment of the natural values on site, an evaluation of the effects on tourism, farming and landscape, and a phased environmental recovery plan.