Korean steel giant Posco has successfully acquired 100% of Anglo Coal’s controversial Sutton Forest project and has transferred a 30% interest to Cockatoo Coal.

Cockatoo, which has rebadged it the “Hume” project to draw attention away from the nearby village of Sutton Forest where Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban have a residence, issued $21.5 million worth of shares to Posco to fund its interest after the transaction received approval from the Foreign Investment Review Board in November.

Korean power group KEPCO has acquired 100% of Anglo Coal's Bylong project, a 423Mt export grade thermal coal resource in NSW, and granted a three year call option for a 30% interest to Cockatoo.

“Key project development teams have been established to determine the development pathway for each of the projects,” Cockatoo said in its latest quarterly report.

“Cockatoo has been appointed as the manager of both projects and is currently establishing full project teams to undertake exploration, evaluation and development activities.

“Due to the timing of completion of the acquisition of these projects, limited activities were undertaken during the quarter.”

Hume would have a resource base of 115 million tonnes of coking coal with a conceptual mine life of 30 years at 1.8Mt per annum.

Residents are concerned that the amenity of the area would be ruined by trucks delivering coal to Port Kembla and that underground aquifers would be disturbed by longwall mining.

Local state MP Pru Goward told ILN that all the residents at public meetings were passionately opposed to longwall mining in the area because of its devastating effect on the environment and the local water supply.

“We are fed by very generous aquifiers and we have a local bottled water industry,” she said.

Goward said while she was not against mining she did not believe longwall coal mining would be acceptable to the local community.

“Longwall mining would have devastating effects. Maybe the coal mining company might consider the old coal mine tunnels,” she said.