The Mining Blog

Xstrata Coal has continued its buying spree with the purchase of Anvil Hill and Austral Coal from Centennial Coal.  Helios Australia (a subsidiary of Xstrata Coal) has paid $1.86 per Austral share.  This means that Centennial will receive A$479 million from XStrata Coal.

Previously, Centennial Coal completed the sale of its Anvil Hill development to XStrata for A$454 million.

Centennial is using the proceeds of both sales to reduce debt and for capital management initiatives.

The NSW government has announced the approval of the controversial Moorlarben mine near Mudgee NSW.

The Greens were challenging the mine, stating that the mine will increase greenhouse gas emissions by 5.3 per cent a year and use 6.9 megalitres of water each day.

However, NSW Planning Minister Frank Sartor said “It’s just not tenable to refuse a coal mine because people might burn coal in China or somewhere else, unless we refused all coal mining”.

I agree with Mr Sartor.  We either mine coal, or we don’t.  There is no point singling out one mine for greenhouse gases just to stop the approval.

As Mr Sartor said when approving the Anvil Hill Mine earlier this year, “a black ban on new coalmine applications in New South Wales alone would devastate the economy, but, worse still, would achieve zero net benefit to climate change because our coal would be substituted with coal from elsewhere”. (Hansard 7 June 2007)