The Clifford project is in the northern Surat Basin, near Stanmore’s The Range Project, a 5 million tonnes per annum advanced thermal coal project and directly north of Glencore’s Wandoan mining lease complex and New Hope Corporation’s Elimatta mining lease application.
It is also close to the Taroom and Collingwood projects recently acquired by New Hope Corporation.
Stanmore Coal managing director Nick Jorss said: “The maiden JORC resource at both the Grange and Liberty areas of the Clifford project is the result of diligent greenfield exploration by the company supported by our Japanese government funding partners at JOGMEC. The coal quality results are very encouraging with all of the usual benefits of Surat coals including strong environmental and operating characteristics.
“In addition the energy levels achieved are very close to the Newcastle benchmark and materially higher than typical Surat coals.”
“We now have proved up over 650Mt of high quality, low emission thermal coal in the Northern Surat Basin between Clifford and The Range projects. We believe Surat Basin coals are increasingly well positioned as other supplies of coal deplete over time and Asian countries continue to build out high efficiency coal fired power stations to satisfy increasing energy demand.
“This year’s JOGMEC sponsored drilling program at Clifford coupled with The Range places the company in a strong position to deliver high quality, cleaner coal to match the long-term demand profile from the neighbouring Asian region.”
The Surat Basin contains large quantities of high quality, low emission export thermal coal product potential, which is well suited to the growing Asian power markets. The Surat Basin coal’s environmental features provide long term certainty around coal quality and emission controls, according to the company.
Overall the Clifford product coal is expected to have the typical Surat advantages of good ignition, high burnout, benign slagging and fouling characteristics and low emissions profile. Surat Basin thermal coal typically exhibit superior environmental features when compared with existing and forecast global supply alternatives, containing less harmful emissions than almost all other coals in the export market.
All cored holes were sampled and analysed through raw, float sink, and clean coal composite procedures. The average raw ash of coal plies (defined as sub 50% ash) was 19.3% for Grange and 19.5% for Liberty.
A number of plies delivered low raw ash values below 10% and may therefore not require processing through a traditional washing circuit in order to meet end user specifications. The “bypass” coal within low-ash Liberty plies amounted to about 15% of coal by mass, with an average ash content of 8%.
For Grange these low-ash plies amounted to about 22% of coal by mass, with an average ash of 7.8%.
Cumulative float yields at 1.60 density were targeted in order to deliver clean coal composites averaging 10% ash or lower. Using this density the average laboratory yield for the Liberty area was 81.6%, achieving 10.1% ash. The average laboratory yield for the Grange area was 82.6%, achieving 9.7% ash.
