In January we assisted the Maules Creek Community Council with their submission on the environmental assessment of the proposed extension to the Boggabri Coal Mine in northern NSW.   The NSW Department of Planning is yet to make a decision on the project due to the many queries raised, changing NSW politics and the increasingly public nature of the mining-farming debate.

In the last few weeks we made a further submission on the environmental assessment, relating to the economic assessment and the underground alternative for the mine.  We highlighted:

• The consultant’s report on the underground option found it was economically viable, but did not carry out financial analysis at the request of the project proponents, Idemitsu.  Our analysis based on the data in this report shows the project would have net revenue of around $1.8 billion, higher than the estimate of production benefits under the project proposal in which was $1.3 billion.
• Calculations in the summary tables of the Economic Assessment weren’t replicable from the numbers presented in the text, with a $500 million dollar difference between them.
• Problems in the economic assessment remain unresolved, notably in relation to
  • Treatment of producer surplus
  • Project definition and scale
  • Opportunity cost
  • Distribution of costs and benefits
  • Inappropriate benefits transfer of social value of employment

You can read our latest submission here

The MCCC are also interested in the economic values of the nearby Leard State Forest.  The forest contains several threatened ecosystems which will be affected by coal mining developments.   We used data from Victoria’s BushBroker programme to estimate a replacement cost for the forest.  Our estimates range between $162,000,000 and $1,500,000,000.  You can download the report here.