[miningmx.com] – CONTINENTAL Coal, an Australian-listed coal-
production and exploration firm, said it hoped to produce first coal from the $40m
Penumbra thermal coal mine in the fourth quarter of the calendar year.
Penumbra, which is located in Mpumalanga province and has a nameplate capacity of
1.4 million tonnes/year (run-of-mine), is part of a strategy to build total coal
production capacity of 7Mtpa.
“We set ourselves an aggressive timetable to bring Penumbra into production and
have overcome some poor geotechnical issues in the first 100 metres of
development,” Don Turvey, CEO of Continental Coal said in an announcement to the
Australian Stock Exchange.
“With the advance rates continuing to improve and with strong performance from
Murray and Roberts, we remain confident we can achieve first mine production coal
from Penumbra early in Q4 CY2012, with the coal immediately washed through our
existing Delta Processing Operations and available for export from our existing rail
siding to Richards Bay Coal Terminal,” he said.
Penumbra is largely financed with R257m from Absa Bank. In addition to the 2Mtpa in
thermal coal produced from Continental Coal’s Ferreira and Vlakvarkfontein mines, the
company is also setting about developing a fourth mine – De Wittekrans – which will
have output of 3.5Mtpa (ROM).
The company also unveiled some 2.2 billion tonnes in resources at three sites in
Botswana. However, the drilling is too widely spaced for the resources declaration to
be compliant with JORC, Australia’s resources reporting standards.
Continental Coal said it would embark on a second phase of drilling in order to verify
economic confidence in the resources.
