A presentation that I gave with Jaime Zsiros from Ecosystem Investment Partners on a unique solution to converting historic mitigation liabilities to current crediting and debiting protocols.

1. Solutions for Compensatory Mitigation
in the Mining Industry And Challenges of
Fulfilling Historic Liabilities With Current
Crediting Protocols
February 25, 2020

2. Regulatory Overview
• Section 404 establishes a program to regulate discharge of dredged or
fill material into Waters of the United States (WOTUS)
• Section 401 water quality certification provides states with a tool to
help protect water quality
• Permittees must compensate for (mitigate) unavoidable impacts by
creating, enhancing, restoring and/or preserving an aquatic resource
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3. Project Overview
• In 2004, a coal company operating in West Virginia submitted a compensatory
mitigation plan (CMP) as part of a Clean Water Act (CWA Section) 401/404 permit
application.
• Mitigation was completed but never monitored as a result of bankruptcy
• Mitigation offset plan developed with the United States Army Corps of Engineers
• Historical impacts requiring mitigation, must be addressed
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4. Project Obstacles
• Differences in historical and current stream assessment methodology
• Stream Habitat Units (SHUs) versus Stream and Wetland Valuation Metric (SWVM)
• SHU is area based and SWVM is linear footage based
• The USACE and WVDEP did not have an approved method to convert SHU to SWVM
debits
• Impact recalculation: 1) would have be inaccurate because the impacts have
occurred and the appropriate baseline data for SWVM wasn’t collected, 2) using the
SWVM would have resulted in a large increase in stream mitigation and financial
burden
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5. Project Solution
• Develop a time and cost-effective solution in the form of a scientifically
based conversion methodology for mitigation bank credit purchase
• Meets client expectations
• Meets regulatory expectations and requirements
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6. Conversion Analysis
• SWVM = weighted average of the metric
scores for HAV, HGM, WVSCI, and water
quality
• Only the HAV was available from the
impact baseline data
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7. Conversion Analysis
• The SHU was calculated based on area, HAV, and flow regime
• (Δ Stream Area) X (Δ HAV) X Classification Value = SHU
Δ= Change from baseline stream value to designed stream value
• The number of SHU credits that theoretically would be created by EIP’s
local mitigation bank was calculated and divided by the number of SWVM
credits that were generated by the same bank
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8. Conversion Analysis Obstacles
• Some of the restored streams were unstable and overly wide, requiring
them to be narrowed to reach stability. This caused negative SHU units
to be generated
• Because the goal should be to restore streams to a stable state,
disregarding area, the baseline width was used for those streams to
avoid penalizing for narrowing streams
• Because streams sometimes need to be narrowed to reach stability, this
causes an issue trying to create a state-wide conversion
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9. SHU credits from
Yeager Bank
SWVM Credits
from Yeager
Bank Reaches
SWVM to SHU
Ratio
SWVM Credits
Needed to Offset
36.82 SHU
debits
388.80 5,183.96 13.33 490.92
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10. SUMMARY
• EIP and CEC worked together on a creative conversion methodology from
SHU to SWVM that received approval from regulatory agencies
• Credit purchase from a mitigation bank provided a cost and time
effective mechanism for the coal company to meet their regulatory
obligations
• Conversion methodology set a precedence for offsetting mitigation
obligations on future projects
• Conversion methodology provided a solution for complying with the
hierarchy established in the 2008 Compensatory Mitigation Rule
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11. Questions
Jaime Zsiros
Assistant Director of Markets
Ecosystem Investment Partners
jaime@ecosystempartners.com
321.258.1774
Ray Ewing
Principal and Corporate Ecological Practice Lead
Civil & Environmental Consultants, Inc.
rewing@cecinc.com
412.249.2363