Bathurst Resources’ bid to fast-track a 25-year extension of coal mining on the West Coast’s Stockton and Denniston plateaux has been sent back as incomplete, less than five weeks after it was lodged.
The company told the Australian Securities Exchange on Thursday that the Environmental Protection Authority had checked the application under section 46 of the Fast-track Approvals Act 2024 and found it was not complete. In its market announcement of 24 September, Bathurst said the application “must address two technical issues further, the first relates to a wildlife approval and the second concerns the consent of the manager of a reserve.”
The miner struck a confident tone. “Bathurst is confident that it will be able to resolve these two matters in short order and will update the market when the substantive application is resubmitted,” the announcement said.
The Buller Plateaux Continuation Project is the biggest item in Bathurst’s growth pipeline. It is a joint project between Bathurst and BT Mining, which is owned 65 percent by Bathurst and 35 percent by Talleys Energy. It targets about 20 million tonnes of coking coal for export to overseas steelmakers, enough for roughly 25 years of mining. Bathurst told the ASX on 17 August that it would lodge the application on 21 August.
For the West Coast, the stakes are jobs. RNZ reported that the company says its West Coast operation employs 390 people, most of them in the Buller district around Westport. Stockton, near Westport, is the country’s largest opencast mine.
Bathurst’s own figures show how much hangs on the new approval. In its full-year results presentation on 2 September, the company listed Stockton as having three-plus years of mine life left. The same slide said Stockton needs blending with coal from the Buller project to reach 15 years of production at an average of 300,000 tonnes a year. Bathurst told investors it expected fast-track approval in 2027 and production from the project in 2028, and it reported holding about $150 million in consolidated cash at 31 July.
Across all its mines in Waikato, Southland and the West Coast, Bathurst says it produces around 1.8 million tonnes of coal a year and employs more than 600 people. Its customers include local steelmaking and domestic dairy and food processing plants, as well as overseas steelmakers buying export coal.
According to RNZ, a fast-track panel wrote to the company earlier this month asking for more information on how it would protect native wildlife, including protected lizards and insects. Bathurst supplied more information on 18 September, but the application still fell short. RNZ said information was still missing on how the company would manage lizards, and it had not provided written agreement from local authorities.
The lizard gap is large. Bathurst’s application said it expected to salvage less than one percent of the lizards living in the proposed mine footprint, RNZ reported, while the Department of Conservation’s best practice is to rescue at least 80 percent.
Forest and Bird, which has long campaigned against mining on Denniston, welcomed the decision but expects Bathurst to return. Its regional conservation manager Scott Burnett told RNZ the lizard issue was “really significant” and described the plateau, with its sandstone pavements and wetlands, as “one of a kind”.
“It can’t just be dug up and put back again,” Burnett said. He did not think the matter was over. “I think they will go back and look at their management proposal for lizards and how they will endeavour to improve upon that.”
In a statement issued on Thursday evening, Forest and Bird acknowledged the return was procedural. “While this is a procedural return under section 46, it signals the deep flaws running through Bathurst’s entire proposal,” Burnett said. The group wants Denniston protected as a scientific reserve.
Climate group 350 Aotearoa called the outcome a “breath of relief for nature” but acknowledged it created uncertainty for workers. “We cannot rely on shaky, boom and bust coal to deliver stable employment for the West Coast,” campaigner Adam Currie told RNZ. “We need a government who will meaningfully invest in delivering long-term, clean jobs that locals can rely on for decades to come.”
The application had been a long time coming. The Fast-track Approvals Act was passed in December 2024, and a timeline compiled by 350 Aotearoa records Bathurst pushing back its expected lodging date several times through 2025 and into 2026. Information released to RNZ under the Official Information Act showed the Department of Conservation invoiced Bathurst $660,000 for pre-lodgement consultation work between January and June this year, with staff spending nearly 3000 hours on it.
What happens next is largely procedural. A section 46 decision is a completeness check, not a ruling on the merits of the mine. Bathurst can fix the gaps and lodge the application again, but Burnett told RNZ a new application would start the full process over again. Only once an application is accepted as complete does an expert panel assess whether the mine should go ahead.
The timing matters for a company whose main West Coast mine is running down. Any slip in resubmission pushes back the panel decision, and with it the 2027 approval and 2028 production dates Bathurst gave investors three weeks ago. The company has not said when it will resubmit beyond “in short order”.
The case also sits in the wider argument over mining on conservation land, which Newswire looked at in New Zealand wants the metal but not the mine. Coking coal is used to make steel rather than to generate power, and metallurgical coal is on New Zealand’s critical minerals list, a point Bathurst highlights to investors. Forest and Bird counters that patching up the application will not change what open-cast mining would do to the plateau.
Should the Denniston Plateau be mined for export coal to protect West Coast jobs, or protected as conservation land? Tell us what you think 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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