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New Hope Corporation Ltd (ASX:NHC) is drawing a line under years of legal wrangling around its New Acland coal mine in Queensland, with local environmental group Oakey Coal Action Alliance (OCAA) agreeing to drop its appeal concerning a water license grant for the mine’s stage three development.
The group had been appealing the Queensland government’s decision to grant an Associated Water License.
On Tuesday, New Hope said its subsidiary – New Acland Coal Pty Ltd – had agreed terms with OCAA about the discontinuation of this appeal.
Now, the agreement moves to receiving consent from the Department of Local Government, Water, and Volunteers, followed by a filing with the Land Court of Queensland. Once the latter is formalised, legal challenges from OCAA would come to an end, allowing New Acland to continue with its stage three plans.
Located in Queensland’s southeast, New Acland is an open-cut thermal coal mine that began operation in October 2002 and moved to a stage two expansion in 2005, making an application for a stage three operation in 2007; the plan has been to produce nine million tonnes per annum, bringing in coal from pits south of the existing mine.
However, the initial EIS (environmental impact statement) process for the stage three expansion was stalled in 2012, when the then (Newman-LNP) Queensland Government decided not to support the project, citing concerns about the damage the mine could cause to prime agricultural land.
Thus, a smaller expansion was then proposed – with a planned output of 7.5Mtpa – with this gaining recommendations from state authorities in 2014, and from the Commonwealth Environment Minister in 2017.
The revised expansion proposal received more than 30 objections from farming and landholding groups after it was publicly advertised in 2015 under the MRA (Mineral Resources Act) and EPA (Environmental Protection Act).
One of these was OCAA – a group of 60 landholders that describes itself as ‘farmers, townsfolk, professionals, and nature defenders’ – and whose appeal against the expansion was ultimately allowed by the High Court of Australia in 2021 before the case was returned to the Land Court.
This process resulted in New Acland being awarded an environmental authority under the EPA for stage three in June 2022, a mining lease under the EPA in August, and an associated water license under the Water Act in October 2022.
The following year, OCAA launched an appeal against the granting of these water rights, but this has been dropped as per the recent agreement between the group and New Acland Coal Pty Ltd.
New Hope Corporation shares shifted up after the news, and at 11:51 AEDT, they were trading at $4.99 – a rise of 2.36% since the market opened.
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