Bathurst hopes to be mining by year end

Bathurst Resources hopes to be mining coal off the Denniston Plateau, inland from Westport, by the end of this year, as long as environmental groups do not appeal an Environment Court ruling upholding the company's resource consents.

Chief executive Hamish Bohannan told a briefing on the court decision that if agreements on environmental mitigation and protection were finalised by next Friday, April 19's court-established deadline, road-making could be under way on the Escarpment mine site by July.

By September or October, the company could be mining rock and overburden covering the high quality coking coal resource on the plateau, to be "in coal" by the end of the year.

Production volumes would be restricted for as long as it took Bathurst to gain consents from the Environmental Protection Authority for a ropeway system to carry coal off the plateau.

Coal would be trucked down in the interim, but the company has ultimate plans to be producing four million tonnes of coal a year off the ecologically significant area, which sits on Department of Conservation land.

Construction on the ropeway could start in November or December.

However, if the Royal New Zealand Forest & Bird Protection Society further appealed the decisions from the Environment Court, a further delay of "four to six months" was likely, Mr Bohannan says.

He had initially hoped to be mining at Escarpment by the end of 2010, but did not receive resource consents until August 2011, whereupon they were appealed by Forest & Bird and the West Coast Environmental Network. Escarpment would be mined for four to five years.

Environment Court judge Laurie Newhook's March 27 "finely balanced" decision gave the parties until next Friday to firm up the detail of Bathurst's environmental remediation commitments, but there was no negotiation with the appellants involved, Bohannan said.

If no agreement could be reached, the court would impose its own timetable. Once this part of the process ends, parties will have 15 working days to decide whether to appeal.

Among Bathurst's commitments is the carve-out of a 745ha protected area which would be protected "from the ravages of open-cut mining, quote unquote", he says.

He criticised the fact the protected area had first been identified in the late 1980s, a report recommending protection had taken until 1998 to produce, and "more damningly, here we are in 2013 with dotted lines on plans suggesting protection".

The court-ordered process represented a resolution to that protracted process.

Bathurst shares have lost two-thirds of their value over the last year, but rose 6.7 percent today, to 32 cents.

(BusinessDesk)