Bathurst 1m tonne coal project

Sources: Bathurst Resources and Lindsay Clark

Bathurst said recent drilling has upgraded initial resources to 47 million tonnes from the earlier reported 42 million tonnes coal because of an increase in discovered resources in the Deep Creek area.

The company said the results had also increased its resource confidence levels for its US$57 million hard coking coal opencast mine on the Denniston plateau above Westport.

Bathurst managing director Hamish Bohannan said when added to the 4.1 million tonnes from the planned start-up Escarpment deposit, “mining at Deep Creek should significantly enhance the economics of the Buller project.”

A feature of the mine plan will be the construction of a slurry pipeline to carry the coal down the steep plateau slope from a Denniston processing plant to a rail load-out 10 km from Westport. Exports would go either through Westport or be railed to Lyttelton.

Bathurst plans to increase production to 1 million tonnes of coking coal a year by 2012 then increase output to 2 million tonnes a year with the addition of other coking coal deposits from the Buller coalfield.

Mr. Bohannan said Bathurst’s recent definitive feasibility study had confirmed the technical and economic feasibility of the company’s project based solely on initial mining of the Escarpment resource at Denniston containing 4 million tonnes of saleable coal. The Escarpment mine had the potential to produce 1 million tonnes a year.

Mr. Bohannan said Bathurst would do more drilling from 2011 to attempt to prove up a further JORC acceptable resources and possibly establish a second mining operation based on the company’s deposits north of Stockton.
Bathurst’s target is to eventually lift exports to 4 million tonnes a year.

Mr. Bohannan said the project’s Brunner bituminous coal was “superior to the best Australian coking coal.”

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