Since landing on the continent in 1961, Alcoa’s Western Australian division has grown into one of the biggest alumina producing operations in the world, and it generates more than three-quarters of the powdery white oxide the company exports raw or smelts into aluminum.
Alcoa’s growing dependence on Australia is reflected in the $650 million share price plummet that followed news in late 2023 of regulatory delays to its plans to mine new forest tracts. CEO William Oplinger recently highlighted the “paramount importance” of those pending approvals in a shareholders meeting from the company’s Pittsburgh boardroom.
Western Australia’s state government has historically supported Alcoa along with the state’s vast mining sector. Even now, critics, including the auditor general, charge the government with troubling leniency toward Alcoa and other mining companies. But opposition is mounting from state agencies, scientists, local politicians and residents as reports warn of irreparable harm to the environment and mining contamination risks that could cost the state billions and leave hundreds of thousands of Perth-area residents without drinking water.
ARC Centre for Mine Site Restoration Director Kingsley Dixon walks through a recently rehabilitated Alcoa mine site near Waroona, a small town about 60 miles south of Perth.
“One thing to remember in the Alcoa story is that back in the ’60s and the ’70s when it started, Perth was a very different place,” said Travis Robinson, a former chief of staff to the state mining minister. “There’s a consciousness or awakening that’s happening because it’s starting to be in people’s backyards.”
Alcoa did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Built on mining
When Alcoa first arrived in Perth, Western Australia’s capital was a modest town of some 400,000 people, supported mostly by cattle and sheep farming. The five-fold growth that’s since turned it into a major metro owes a large part to a booming mining sector extracting aluminum, copper, iron, nickel and more from the resource-rich continent.
Western Australia is now the wealthiest state in the country relative to its population. In 2023, the per capita gross domestic product was around U.S. $101,000 or 62% above the national average. Mining accounted for just under half of its total U.S. $287 billion annual output.
“It’s the significant driver of the Western Australian economy,” said Robinson. “And I would almost suggest of the Australian economy.”
Alcoa's idled Kwinana refinery is located south of Perth along the Western Australian coast.
Alcoa is one of the industrial players that benefited from 64 unique state agreements passed since 1952 by acts of parliament to attract overseas investment.
“Most people understand the reason for [state agreements] originally was to bring a big entity, create this economic prosperity, give them some privileges,” said Mike Walmsley, president of Waroona shire, a local government encompassing Alcoa’s Wagerup refinery. “This was a long time ago when Perth was like a small city really.”
Alcoa’s three agreements — one for each of its refineries — extend rights to scarce water along with low royalty and taxation rates. And because they predate the Environmental Protection Act, the company has historically been able to claim exemption from the purview of the Environmental Protection Authority’s [EPA] independent advisory board as it has cut deeper into the fragile jarrah forest.
Growing scrutiny of Alcoa’s plans, fronted by a grassroots petition with more than 2,000 supporters, means that the company is under review from the EPA for the first time.
The state government is working to bring Alcoa under a “contemporary” regulatory framework and “has implemented strict controls over the company’s mining operations during the transition period,” a government spokesperson wrote to PublicSource.
George Walley, a Noongar elder, stands at the edge of an Alcoa mining site near Jarrahdale, Western Australia.
Still, critics of Alcoa said government leadership hasn’t caught on to the calls for change. The belief that mining interests wield excessive power over the Western Australian government was shared by many of the more than 50 scientists, advocates, First Nations people, mineworkers and residents that PublicSource journalists spoke to during 16 days of early spring reporting in the state.
“The right to mine reigns supreme,” said Martin Brueckner, a researcher at Murdoch University in Perth who wrote a book about Alcoa’s impact on rural communities. “There is no justice and there is no deterrence.”
Alcoa’s plans vs. water needs
A test of Alcoa’s clout in Western Australia emerged in 2023, when public concern mounted that the company could contaminate the drinking water supply for Perth, a metro of 2.3 million people.
At the time, Alcoa sought higher quality bauxite, which it could refine and export for greater profit. The company was pushing for an aggressive new mining plan that would allow it to mine in previously restricted “high-risk” areas, including inside protected water catchment zones.
That March, the state-owned Water Corporation reported that Alcoa’s plan posed “a significant increase in risk,” potentially endangering drinking water for all of Perth’s reservoirs. The Water Corporation warned of a potential $1.7 billion cost, and that the long-term development of the city and region could be stunted due to “financial impacts and water shortages.”
The Department of Water and Environmental Regulation rejected Alcoa’s plan “in its entirety.”
In a December 2023 letter to Western Australian Premier Roger Cook, Alcoa leadership wrote that “it is not economically viable” for the company to retreat from those “higher-risk” areas, including those close to reservoirs. The company committed to new measures to “mitigate and minimise any risks to public drinking water."
Six days later, the government issued a special exemption: Alcoa would be allowed to mine the areas it proposed in its new plan, bypassing the Environmental Protection Act that normally prohibits doing so while a proposal is under review. According to the government, the exemption sets limits to the areas in which Alcoa can explore, clear and mine and requires the company to make regular reports for compliance. “Any breach of conditions would see the exemption order immediately cancelled, and the state government retains the right to withdraw or amend the exemption at any point,” the spokesperson added.
The state government said it secured a $100 million financial guarantee from Alcoa should the company affect Perth’s drinking water dams, according to a spokesperson. The Water Corporation reported internally that the exemption affords “little to no ability for protection of drinking water.”
The government pointed to the roughly 6,000 jobs (direct and contracted) and nearly U.S. $1 billion per year that Alcoa sustains in the Western Australia economy as justifying the exemption.
Alcoa has mined near drinking water reservoirs, including the Serpentine Dam that feeds Perth and its suburbs.
Two years later, the EPA review is still underway, and Alcoa continues to mine deeper into the jarrah forest, even where camping, fishing, boating, biking, swimming and dogs are prohibited to prevent pollution to drinking water.
Meanwhile, the Water Corporation is still raising alarm, reporting internally in October a “clear and consistent” warning that Alcoa’s mining “risks water supply to millions of households and businesses across Perth” and the surrounding regions “for a prolonged, indefinite period.”
‘Rapid exit’ and rehabilitation
Many, including Alcoa, believe the terms of the company’s 60-year-old agreements with Western Australia must be revisited to ensure the company is appropriately regulated.
But it’s unclear what a new agreement would look like, when it might be codified or what that would mean for the company from Pittsburgh. Alcoa has said it is committed to modernization, including assessment by the EPA for “all new major mining areas.”
PublicSource repeatedly approached Alcoa with questions about its global business strategy, its relationship with the Australian government and its environmental and public health responsibilities. The company declined all requests.
In August, the Western Australian government published a review of state agreements and began to discuss a “new governance structure.” Alcoa’s agreement, the report said, has “no provision” for a formal approval of the company’s mining plans. Rather, a review and approval process has “evolved” over many years, and “presents a significant and legally uncertain diversion” from Alcoa’s statutory obligations.
The government proposed a new structure, which calls for Alcoa’s “rapid exit from all reservoir protection zones,” accelerated rehabilitation of mine sites and increased oversight from the state Department of Health in ensuring public safety and the regulation of Perth’s drinking water. Premier Cook endorsed this position last August.
The new structure also called for the formation of a new body that would consider risks and “help government ensure there is a clear path of where mining is preferred into the future.”
A new vision?
Walmsley, who leads a coalition of local governments called the Peel Alliance, said he’s “made countless approaches to say, ‘[Alcoa’s agreement] needs to be amended, it needs to be modernized,’ and even Alcoa are at the point of saying that they’d like to see it modernized because it’s antiquated.”
Mike Walmsley, president of Waroona shire, at a park built by Alcoa in Waroona.
The Peel Alliance, which encompasses five local governments and several nonprofit groups active in Alcoa’s footprint, published a position statement on “mining and extractive industries” intended to promote and protect the region’s natural resources and the industries such as farming and ecotourism they can support.
The statement:
Calls for changes to the existing “regulatory landscape,” including updates to existing state agreements
Seeks protections for the region’s environment and natural resources, which, the group contends, form the basis of its economic security
Requests increased engagement with “host communities” and mechanisms to ensure compliance and transparency.
High on Walmsley’s list is protecting the local water supply of which Alcoa, through its water-intensive refining process, is a major consumer.
“There would be significantly more horticultural pursuits in the area if water was available to them,” he said.
While he’s pushing for tighter regulation, Walmsley acknowledged the jobs hinging on the company, which he says he doesn’t want to eliminate.
“I think we've got the community support to say, look, we understand the importance of what they're doing, but we've gotta protect what we've got left.”
Children cross a suspension bridge above the Murray River in Pinjarra, home to Alcoa's largest refinery in Western Australia.
Seeking to save the jobs while going greener
Just as leaders in Southwestern Pennsylvania grapple with the harms of extractive industry like fracking and the economic consequences of its regulation, navigating the push and pull between mining jobs and environmental destruction is a central tension for Australian officials. Robinson, though, doesn’t see them as fundamentally incompatible.
“There's an assumption that jobs have to win or the environment has to win,” said the former chief of staff who now manages a Perth-based investment fund with mining interests in its portfolio. “Both of those can coexist. You can have environmentally sensitive development that provides the economic activity that a state or an economy needs, that families need for jobs and employment, while also protecting critical aspects of the environment.”
Lorry Ierace, a former Alcoa miner, drives along his property that shares a border with Alcoa's Willowdale mine on three sides.
A government spokesperson said the decision to exempt Alcoa “considered a range of factors, including the need to protect WA’s environment and Perth’s drinking water sources, while also safeguarding the jobs of the thousands of workers employed by Alcoa.”
Western Australia’s two main parties (Labour and Liberal) have historically stuck by mining interests because of the economic leverage the sector commands, according to Green Party lawmakers Jess Beckerling and Brad Pettit.
Beckerling recently entered parliament as part of a modest Green Party groundswell that carried them to four of the upper chamber’s 37 seats. And because neither major party has a simple majority, either side would need Green support to pass bills, according to Pettit, the party’s lone elected lawmaker prior to the March election.
Beckerling, who headed the referral process that brought Alcoa’s expansion under review, hopes the heightened scrutiny may now cut through.
“We can hope that the EPA will give us some strong recommendations about changes that need to be made. And then the spotlight will really be on [elected government leaders], if they ignore the EPA after all of this.”
Pettit said Alcoa uses the threat of job losses to secure concessions from the government.
“Now is the right time for Alcoa to wind down,” he said “… Alcoa needs WA more than WA needs Alcoa.”
A conveyor belt supplies Alcoa's Wagerup refinery around the clock with bauxite from its sprawling mines.
The Fund for Investigative Journalism also contributed funding to support this project.
Jamie Wiggan is deputy editor at Pittsburgh’s PublicSource and can be reached at jamie@publicsource.org.
Quinn Glabicki is the environment and climate reporter at Pittsburgh’s PublicSource and a Report for America corps member. He can be reached at quinn@publicsource.org and on Instagram @quinnglabicki.
Quinn Glabicki is a freelance photojournalist and writer currently covering climate change and the environment for PublicSource.
He has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Guardian
Jamie Wiggan
Jamie Wiggan
