Linc landed the royalty benefits when it sold the Carmichael acreage to Adani under a $500 million deal in 2010 with Adani agreeing to pay Linc a $2 per tonne royalty on future thermal coal from the tenement for the first 20 years of production.

While Linc once expected the royalty deed to provide a total cash stream of $3 billion, its CEO Peter Bond is prioritising other opportunities such as further investment into its South Australian shale oil hunting subsidiary Sapex.

“Though I would have liked to keep this asset for the longer term, it makes sense to start to cash up our balance sheet and start to drop out the debt and focus on our world-class assets like the Sapex shale,” he said.

“In addition the reality is the price of steaming coal has nearly halved since we sold the Carmichael coal asset to Adani four years ago and the risk of holding the royalty long term versus what we can do with the cash today doesn’t add up for us.

“Linc Energy is focusing upon key assets like the 16 million contiguous acres of shale, potentially yielding 103 billion barrels of oil equivalent prospective resource of oil and gas which in itself is a world class asset.”

Once finalised the royalty sale is expected to provide Linc with $90 million cash in five days and the remaining $65 million within 12 months.

Linc switched over from an Australia listing to a Singapore listing in December.

The Carmichael project is targeting 60 million tonnes per annum of export capacity.

Mining will involve the development of six open pits and five underground mines over 60 years, with the first surface operation planned for 2016 with a production rate of 5.5Mtpa.

Initial longwall production from the first underground mine is expected to reach 2.5Mtpa run-of-mine in 2018.