The licence, granted by the UK Coal Authority, is part of the Canonbie coalfield and covers a 67.5sq.km area across the Scotland-England border.

The miner announced a conceptual exploration target for the site of 330-410 million tonnes of metallurgical coal in the semi-hard to hard coking coal range.

Quality is expected to be high volatile, high calorific value, low ash, modest to high sulphur and with high swell indices.

Lochinvar coal seams are expected to start at depths of 100m from the surface based on historic drilling and seismic data.

New Age Exploration managing director Gary Fietz said the company was excited about the potential of a major project at Lochinvar which had excellent infrastructure in place and was located in very close proximity to European steel mills.

“NAE plans to rapidly progress evaluation and development of a significant underground mining project to exploit the shallow coking coal exploration target,” he said.

“We will be building a small team in the UK to quickly advance the drilling program, supported by our local consultants, which will assist us in advancing towards a JORC resource definition in the upcoming year.”

Delineation of a maiden JORC resource is anticipated within 12 months.

While the Canonbie coal field is a known region, it is only with recent rising coal prices that a renewed interest in the development of UK coal projects has occurred.

NAE says projects in this area, including Lochinvar, demonstrated the right characteristics of scale without the challenges of reopening old workings and were near communities supportive of development.

Lochinvar is 21km north of Carlisle and 120km southeast of Glasgow.

“Significantly to our shareholders, Lochinvar was identified by our in-house business development team and has been secured at minimal cost via a competitive application process from the UK Coal Authority,” the company said.

“As such, there are no vendor payments and our funds only need to be used to define and develop the project and not on any vendor or third party payments.

“That we were able to secure such a substantial coking coal project through a competitive process for only the standard application fees in these times of strong coking coal demand is quite a feat.

“The ‘concealed’ nature of the deposit and the timing of its discovery and exploration during a long period of the wholesale decline in the UK coal industry are good indicators as to why Lochinvar has remained unexploited until now.

“This new licence diversifies our portfolio to another global region whilst maintaining our coal focus.”

Granting of the Lochinvar licence marks NEA’s first coal acquisition outside of Colombia.

The miner said it intended to advance its Colombian and UK coal projects in tandem.

In 2011, NAE completed five acquisitions involving three coking coal concessions in central Colombia and three thermal coal concessions located in the Cesar Basin in northern Colombia.

The company aims to move from coal explorer to producer via the Terranova coking coal mine in Colombia’s Subachoque Valley.

The mine already produces 25,000 tonnes per annum but NAE plans to ramp it up to 365,000tpa by January 2013.