Category: Developments

BY ELIZABETH FABRI DUNDAS Mining will reopen its mothballed Avebury nickel mine with production to resume in January 2019. The mine, purchased last year from MMG for $25 million, has been on care and maintenance since 2009 amid a downturn in the nickel market. Resurgent prices over the last 12 months encouraged Dundas to bring the mine back to life. “When we signed up to buy this place it (the nickel price) was $US7000 a tonne. It’s now $US15,000 a tonne,” Dundas Mining chief executive Geoff Summers told The Advocate. Tasmanian Premier Will Hodgman said a recruitment process had begun, with more than 200 jobs to be made available across mining, processing, and administration. He said the State Government was also…

BY CAMERON DRUMMOND LITHIUM developer Kidman Resources is the first Australian miner to sign an offtake agreement with Elon Musk’s Tesla. Kidman entered into a binding agreement to supply lithium hydroxide to the electric vehicle maker over an initial three year term on a fixed price, take-or-pay basis. Kidman and Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (SQM), under their Western Australia Lithium (WAL) 50:50 joint venture, are building a lithium hydroxide plant in Kwinana, south of Perth, to process spodumene concentrate from their Mt Holland hard rock lithium project. According to Kidman, the Tesla offtake deal equates to less than 25 per cent of Kidman’s proportion of output from the proposed 44,000tpa refinery. Other commercial terms of the agreement were…

BY ELIZABETH FABRI THE controversial Wallarah 2 underground coal mine has the tick of approval from the NSW Government to begin development. In mid-January, the NSW Planning Assessment Commission (PAC) declared the Wyong Areas Coal JV project on the Central Coast “in the public interest” and granted consent for it to produce up to 5 million tonnes of run of mine (ROM) thermal coal a year for 25 years, subject to conditions. “The Commission heard and acknowledged strong calls for it to take a precautionary approach given the potential for impacts to the Central Coast’s drinking water supply catchment,” PAC stated. “The issue has been assessed in detail. Impacts were assessed to be small and acceptable, with no net impact on…

BY CAMERON DRUMMOND BBI Group (BBIG) has received the final assent of a WA Government agreement for its multi-billion dollar Balla Balla Infrastructure (BBI) project, linking iron ore deposits from the Central Pilbara with a new export facility at the Balla Balla port via a 162km purpose-built railway. The ratification of the project by Parliament is seen as a big step forward for the project, which would create about 3000 jobs during construction and about 900 operational positions. BBIG estimated that the total royalties payable to the WA Government from customer mines over the life of the project could be in excess of $4 billion. BBIG chairman Jon Young said the company was particularly pleased with the bipartisan support that…

BY ELIZABETH FABRI MINERAL sands producer Iluka Resources’ has approved the development of its Cataby mine in WA, after securing major offtake agreements in December. Cataby, 150km north of Perth, will produce an average of 370,000 tonnes of chloride ilmenite per annum, which will be processed into 200,000tpa of premium grade synthetic rutile at Iluka’s Synthetic Rutile kiln 2 (SR2), 350km south of the project. The mine will also produce about 50,000tpa of premium grade zircon and 30,000tpa of rutile, which will be processed at Iluka’s Narngulu mineral separation plant in Geraldton. On 12 December, Iluka announced it had entered into take-or-pay offtake agreements for a minimum of 175,000t of synthetic rutile per annum (about 85 per cent of production…