OceanaGold has asked a fast track panel to let it keep digging at Macraes until the late 2030s, ten months after it walked away from the same fight in front of Otago councils.
The company told investors on 9 September it had lodged its Macraes Phase Four application under the Fast-track Approvals Act 2024. The project would extend the East Otago mine beyond its current reserve life of 2032, adding open pit cutbacks at Innes Mills, Coronation, Coronation North and Golden Bar, plus an extension of the Golden Point underground mine.
The numbers put in front of the panel are large. As reported by the Otago Daily Times, OceanaGold is targeting an extra one million ounces of gold worth about $7.46 billion at current prices, with roughly $3.1 billion of spending over more than ten years and about $1 billion of that landing in Otago. It says the work would sustain more than 760 direct jobs and thousands of indirect ones, and that more than 875 hectares would be put under what it calls enduring ecological protection.
Without approval, the company says the operation would begin winding down from 2027 and close by 2030.
What makes this more than a routine consent story is where the same proposal ended up last time. OceanaGold lodged Macraes Phase Four with the Otago Regional Council, Dunedin City Council and Waitaki District Council in 2024 as a standard Resource Management Act application. In June 2025 the regional council released its section 42A staff report, and the recommendation ran to a single blunt line. “Under s104B it is recommended that this consent application be declined in full,” the report said.
The reasons were not marginal. The report found effects on surface water quality, aquatic ecology, natural inland and ephemeral wetlands, lizard habitat and a threatened invertebrate species that were “significantly adverse and cannot be avoided, minimised, remedied, offset, or compensated for”. It said four specific pieces of the plan had to be avoided outright, among them the Coronation Stage 6 pit extension and the Golden Bar waste rock stack extension for their effects on rock tors, and it concluded that consent for earthworks in some of those wetlands was simply precluded by the freshwater regulations.
OceanaGold did not test that at a hearing. The regional council’s own file records that the company withdrew application RM24.184 on Friday 14 November 2025. RNZ reported the withdrawal followed the council granting separate consents that let existing mining at Macraes carry on for another five years, which bought the company time.
Ten months later much of the same ground goes to a different decision maker under different rules. Macraes Phase Four was named as a listed project when the fast track legislation was drafted, so the application goes to the Environmental Protection Authority for a completeness check and then to an independent expert panel, with no public hearing of the sort the councils were preparing for.
The other thing that changed since June 2025 is the gold price, and it has moved further than most people would guess.
On the day the council planner recommended declining the expansion, the London afternoon gold fix was US$3,319.30 an ounce and the New Zealand dollar bought about 60.5 US cents, which put gold at roughly NZ$5,490 an ounce. On 8 September this year the fix was US$4,399.10 and the kiwi had slipped to about 58.4 US cents, or roughly NZ$7,530 an ounce. That is a rise of about 37 percent in New Zealand dollar terms, most of it the metal and about four percentage points of it the currency. Gold is still down on its own record, a fix of US$5,405 set on 29 January this year, and the softer kiwi has taken only a few points off that decline for a miner that sells in United States dollars and pays wages in New Zealand ones.
The kiwi has been testing 13 year lows, interest.co.nz reported on 9 September, dipping to an overnight low of 58.36 US cents. BNZ strategist Jason Wong wrote that the New Zealand dollar had struggled since the Reserve Bank’s dovish hike the week before, and that “tolerating higher inflation is a recipe for a weaker currency”.
That shows up directly in the mine’s accounts. In OceanaGold’s June quarter results, Macraes produced 41,400 ounces at all in sustaining costs of US$1,932 an ounce while the group sold gold at an average of US$4,433. That is a gap of about US$2,500 an ounce. A year earlier the same mine ran at US$2,146 an ounce against a US$3,293 gold price, a gap of about US$1,150. The margin has more than doubled in twelve months. Royalties booked against Macraes tell the same story, rising from US$3.3 million in the first half of 2025 to US$13.6 million in the first half of this year.
Chief executive Gerard Bond said the application was “an important step in securing the long-term future of Macraes through permitting of additional open pit cutbacks and a mine life extension to the late 2030s”, and that recent drilling identified “further opportunities to potentially enable meaningful gold production into the 2040s”. The company is spending US$13 million on exploration at Macraes this year and drilling 60,000 metres, and has flagged the old Round Hill deposit as a possible extension beyond Phase Four.
Alison Paul, OceanaGold’s senior vice president for legal and public affairs, said the company had “spent many months talking with and listening to a wide variety of stakeholders both locally and across the wider region in the lead-up to lodging this application” and that the engagement “has directly shaped the project design, including mitigation and ecological enhancement measures now built into MP4”. She also said around 80 cents in every dollar the company spends stays in New Zealand.
The company’s compliance record will get an airing either way. An independent audit commissioned by the Dunedin City and Waitaki District councils, reported by RNZ in December 2024, found 14 breaches of consent conditions covering weed and pest control, planting, damage to protected covenant land and destruction of lizard habitat. Paul told RNZ at the time the company was working with the councils to close the gaps.
Macraes started producing in 1990 with an expected seven year life. It passed six million ounces in July. OceanaGold expects the fast track process to be finished by the middle of 2027, subject to appeals. Its Waihi North project went through the same route and was approved in December last year.
What do you make of a mine going back for the same expansion through a different door? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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