An Alabama company is planning to strip mine for titanium and other heavy minerals in an area of Charlton County bordering the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, an idea that the DuPont Co. abandoned in the late 1990s after government and public outcry against it.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers posted a joint public notice with the state of Georgia on Friday indicating it had received a Clean Water Act permit application from Birmingham, Alabama-based Twin Pines Minerals. The corps is asking for public comments on the permit.

In the application, the company indicated it plans to extract "high quality heavy mineral reserves" for "export by truck, rail and eventual barge to national and international customers."

"Mineral sand-derived products, particularly those containing titanium dioxide and zirconium, are in high demand worldwide in the pigment, aerospace, medical, foundry, and other industrial products," the document states. "Elemental components, chiefly titanium, are used as the white pigments. Titanium dioxide is nontoxic and has replaced lead as the predominant pigment in paints and coatings."

Twin Pines is proposing to operate its mining facility in stages on about 19 square miles along a ridge of land bordering the refuge, digging to variable depths that will average 50 feet below the land surface on two of the three tracts and 25 feet below the surface on the third. The company is proposing to backfill and grade the mined land within about 30 days following excavation with replanting during the appropriate planting season.

Impact to ecosystem

The first phase of the project will bring permanent impacts to 65 acres of wetlands and nearly a mile of tributaries, the company predicted. Gopher tortoises, a threatened species that is considered a "keystone" species on which other animals depend, will be impacted due to construction of facilities and mining activities.

The 635-square-mile Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, the largest blackwater swamp North America, drew more than 600,000 visitors from the U.S. and 40 other countries over the last year and a half, said Susie Heisey, the supervisory refuge ranger. They experienced what National Geographic named one of the 100 most beautiful places on the planet.

"One of the coolest things about the Okefenokee is that it's basically an intact ecosystem," said Refuge Manager Michael Lusk, noting that the Everglades, while larger, had been ditched and drained. And while there once was logging in some parts of the Okefenokee, the swamp has been protected for more than 80 years. "What we have now is a large intact, functioning ecosystem and that is so rare, especially in the eastern U.S."

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which operates the refuge, will prepare formal comments on the permit application, Lusk said. Concerns will focus on the effects of a strip mining operation on the area's hydrology, the underground movement of water.

DuPont abandoned mining proposal

"We'll have similar concerns as when the DuPont mining proposal was made," Lusk said.

That proposal resulted in no mining and an eventual expansion of the refuge.

In the spring of 1997, then Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt opposed the strip mining in advance of hearing DuPont's arguments for it.

''You can study this, you can write all the documents in the world,'' Babbitt was quoted in the New York Times, ''but they are not going to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there will be no impact.''

Later that year the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service pulled out of discussions over the mining, saying compromise was not possible, the Savannah Morning News reported. DuPont eventually agreed to abandon its plans to mine titanium and in 2003 the company donated all 16,000 acres to The Conservation Fund, which in 2005 transferred nearly 7,000 acres to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as an addition to Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.

The Georgia Conservancy has been following plans to mine near the Okefenokee and will request a public hearing from the corps, said Coastal Director Charles McMillan III. The conservation group has two major concerns. First there's the potential harm to the Okefenokee, especially if the underground flow of water is altered. McMillan, who founded a civil and environmental engineering firm before joining the Georgia Conservancy, pointed back to the for Interior Secretary's remarks two decades ago.

"Babbitt mentioned concerns about the hydrology," he said. "That's pretty chilling, isn't it?"

Then there's the land to be mined, which is located on Trail Ridge. It's an ancient beach that runs from the Altamaha River 130 miles south to the Santa Fe River in Florida and a valuable habitat itself.

"Trail Ridge is an important component of the State Wildlife Action Plan," he said. "It has critically important species."

Like the gopher tortoise. McMillan is concerned that even if individual tortoises were rounded up and conserved, altering Trail Ridge will isolate groups of them, leaving them less genetically diverse.

"There needs to be on-site mitigation so you can leave them there afterward," he said.

Asked for comment on the application, a lobbyist for Twin Pines Minerals, Steve Allen of Joe Tanner & Associates, responded with a written fact sheet that reiterated much of the material in the application. It added an anticipated start date for mining activities, however, of January 2020. It is anticipated that the proposed facility will have an operational life of eight years, the fact sheet stated. It also changed the estimate of workers from the "full-time employment of approximately 150-200 workers from the local area" listed in the application to "this activity will result in the full-time employment of approximately 300 workers."