$6.4B Alpha project faces new environmental hurdles
Mark Mentiplay, 5th Jun 2012
June 5 – The Queensland government’s escalating “get out of the way” verbal battle with the federal government over what it sees as costly federal-instigated delays to major resources projects in the state appears to have entered the realm of pure political grandstanding.
Last month, Deputy Premier and State Development, Infrastructure and Planning Minister Jeff Seeney climbed into the feds for its alleged environment-related delays to Rio Tinto's $A1.45B South of Embley bauxite mine on Cape York in far N Australia, already given a state green light.
The latest project to face the ire of Seeney’s “new broom, get the state economy moving again” policy is the $6.4B Alpha coal project, one of the biggest in Australia and the first of several thermal coal mines planned for a new coal region in the Galilee Basin. Alpha, owned by India’s leading infrastructure developer, the GVK Group (79%) and Gina Rinehart’s private company Hancock Prospecting, is expected to produce 30Mtpa over more than 30 years from a string of six opencut pits extending over 24km.
Seeney immediately called on his federal counterpart Tony Burke to stop playing politics and adhere to the Commonwealth-State Bilateral Agreement for environmental approvals, which requires the federal minister to make a decision within 30 business days of receiving the Queensland Coordinator-General's Alpha report, which gave the project conditional approval, subject to 128 conditions.
The problem is that presumably the countdown only started on May 29, when the report was handed down, so the feds are still well within the specified time.
Despite this, Seeney says "Queensland wants the federal government to meet its obligations under that bilateral agreement and the EPBC Act, and make a decision within 30 business days."
However, there are now rumblings coming out of Canberra and Brisbane that the state environmental report is incomplete and may require time-consuming federal intervention to finish. Seeney denies this and says no new substantive issues have been raised by the Commonwealth in relation to the Queensland Coordinator-General's approval, Burke’s claims being “nothing more than a rehash of comments previously provided to the Coordinator-General”.
In his support for Rio's South of Embley bauxite mine, Seeney referred to the “spurious claims made by extremist greens” that the mine would cause an additional 700 shipping movements annually through the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.
Seeney said additional shipping associated with the project would be just 30 ships a year, with such movements addressed and approved at a federal and state level when the Yarwun alumina refinery expansion was assessed.
However, importantly, the shipping movements are now subject to a new, separate federal environmental impact statement, for which the federal environment minister is still considering guidelines.
The project will extend the life of bauxite mining near Weipa for another 40 years via a new opencut mine, with initial production of 22.5Mtpa and a potential to increase to 50Mtpa.
The Alpha coal project’s approval by the Queensland Coordinator General came after consideration of an environmental impact assessment and associated materials submitted by Hancock Coal (the GVK/Hancock JV), 60 public submissions, a supplementary EIS and a 393-page report listing 128 conditions. Now it has to go through federal government environmental assessment.
Construction of the mine is planned to begin next year and take three years, with first production in 2016. The project includes the construction and operation of a multi-user rail link and 60Mtpa port and materials handling facility at Abbott Point.
Alpha has a JORC-compliant measured, indicated and inferred resource of 1.821Bt within the opencut area, with potential for resources to be substantially upgraded with further drilling to west of the open cuts. Potential also exists for future the development of significant underground reserves, and coal liquefaction and gasification operations within the deposit.
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