New Acland thrives in 2025
One year after the reopening of New Hope Group’s New Acland coal mine, the Australian Mining Review takes a look at the rich history of the site and catches up with New Hope Group chief executive officer Rob Bishop to reflect and canvass projections for 2025 and beyond.
Body copy: Located just north of Acland and Oakey in the famously lush pastoral Darling Downs region of Queensland lies New Hope Group’s New Acland mine, which has finally sprung back to life after a protracted approval process for its stage three iteration.
The open cut coal mine — part of the Walloon Coal Measures, a late Jurassic geologic subgroup based in the Surat Basin that contains more than 500mt of coal — first commenced its present-day operations in 2002 before launching an expansion (stage two) in 2007.
In 2012 a revised proposal for an expansion to the site, dubbed New Acland Stage 3, was accepted by the Federal Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, but the project languished in legal limbo after bouncing around an array of varying courts for years.
It was finally approved by the Queensland government in 2022 and recommenced its operations in 2023.
History
Surrounded by fertile farming land and sweeping vistas, coal mining in Acland and Oakey stretches back to 1913 when the Acland Coal Company opened its first colliery and then its second in 1929.
Until the 1950s, the coal produced at the sites was initially for the benefit of the local market which comprised steamships and later locomotives.
At the time, a coal workers’ pay was based on the weight of coal that they produced and the measurement systems were rudimentary, according to the Queensland Heritage Register.
Excavated coal was manually loaded into skips by workers before being moved along an underground tramline to the main underground haul road, where a steam operated cable and pulley system then hauled them to the pithead.
When the skips arrived at the pithead, they passed over a weighbridge where they were weighed and a tally desk determined how much a worker had produced for the day.
The weighbridge, tally desk and most components at the site still survive extant at Acland today after the Acland No. 2 Colliery became heritage listed in June 2007.
The introduction of electricity in the Oakey area in the late 1940s stimulated increased mechanisation of the area’s coalmines and the gradual electrification transformed the coal mines in the area significantly.
Screening plants were driven by new electric motors and haulage systems were converted from steam to electricity. A Sampson coal cutter and a Sampson coal loader were introduced in the latter part of the decade.
From the late 1950s, the coal mines in the Acland area fell victim to major changes taking place in the coal industry. The demand for coal to supply Queensland Rail, traditionally a major customer of the small mines, dramatically fell during the 1960s due to the conversion from steam to diesel locomotives.
Another factor was the shift to more efficient large-scale mining which led to open cut mines dominating the landscape.
By 1971, the Acland No. 2 Colliery was the only coal mine left on the Darling Downs and by 1984, it had shut its doors, with the Toowoomba Hospital being one of its final customers.
New Acland today
In 2002, New Acland was bought back to life and in 2007, proceeded to its Stage 2 phase.
Since its Stage 3 approval, it has been extracting coal since September 2023 rendering it a multi-pit, multi-seam open-cut thermal coal operation that operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
A significantly more sophisticated operation than its predecessors’ decades prior, New Acland uses the excavator and truck approach and washes and sorts the coal on site.
From there, the coal is then loaded onto trains and transported to Queensland Bulk Handling, a coal export facility owned by New Hope Group situated at the Port of Brisbane, before being shipped to customers in Asia, South America and some domestic customers in south east Queensland.
To reduce the potential for coal dust to come off trains, a veneer is sprayed onto the coal prior to departure. Real-time dust and air quality monitoring is undertaken at the Jondaryan Rail Loading Facility located near the mine to manage impacts and government regulation purposes.
New Acland Stage 3 has been granted approval for the production of 7.5mtpa of coal and is expected to have about 400 permanent employees once it operates at full capacity.
New Hope Group chief executive officer Rob Bishop says he is proud to have spearheaded kickstarting the mine again and that a pivotal consideration for the company, when Stage 3 was being conceived, was a localised workforce rather than FIFO or DIDO.
“At New Acland Coal, there are currently more than 250 employees on site, with more than 90% living within 50km of the operation,” he said.
“Further intakes are planned for FY25 as the operation ramps up to 5mtpa over the next three years.”
According to New Hope, New Acland’s first twelve months since its reopening achieved key goals the company had set.
First coal was mined, railed and sold during the year which culminated in a total of 2.4mt of ROM coal production and more than 1mt of saleable coal production, in line with predictions.
The recommencement of operations at New Acland also saw a number of key development activities completed during FY24, including the refurbishment of the secondary Coal Handling and Preparation Plant and construction of the Lagoon Creek Crossing, allowing access to the Willeroo Pit.
The team is currently mining in both the Manning Vale East and Willeroo Pits and will continue to progress planning and surface infrastructure works in preparation for commencing mining activities in the Manning Vale West Pit, expected towards the end of CY25.
Local businesses in the area have played a crucial role in the successes to date including Roc Drill and the MCC Group.
New Hope has also been focused on broader business growth strategies according to Mr Bishop, with both divestments and investments playing a key role.
“We completed the divestment of our non-operational West Moreton assets, including the rehabilitated Jeebropilly mine and surrounding land assets, shortly after the end of FY24,” he said.
“During the year, we continued to focus on the longer-term growth of our business by executing certain strategic objectives, including increasing our equity interest in Malabar Resources Limited from 15% to 19.97%.”
Malabar Resources (ASX: MBC) is an independent Sydney-based resources company that operates in both the mining and renewable energy sectors and has as its primary asset the Maxwell Underground Mine.
Maxwell is an underground site that produces high quality metallurgical coal used to make steel and uses bord and pillar and longwall mining methods.
Malabar also holds an exploration licence over a 33km2 area of land to the west of the Maxwell Underground, known as the Spur Hill Underground Coking Project (Spur Hill Underground).
Malabar also boasts the up-and-coming Maxwell Solar Farm, which is an approved 25MW solar farm, which will be located on rehabilitated land within the Maxwell Infrastructure site south of Muswellbrook. The solar farm will generate more than 60GWh annually, providing enough energy to power around 10,000 local homes.
“The increased investment in Malabar provides exposure to metallurgical coal and aligns with our strategy of investing in low-cost coal assets with long-life approvals,” Mr Bishop said.
New Hope Group also operates the Bengalla Coal mine, an open-cut coal mine near Muswellbrook in NSW, which has approval to extract 15mtpa of run-of-mine coal until 2039.
