While she was at AMCI’s Brisbane office last week, Hollows officially starts with AMCI today and is understandably not commenting on her role until she is more familiar with it.
One of the few females to reach the CEO-level of a significant mining company, Hollows was previously working for her consultancy business Hollows Investments.
Her first notable work after Peabody acquired Macarthur in 2011 was a six-month consultancy contract with Queensland Investment Corporation, which ended in November 2012.
AMCI, which owns half of the vast South Galilee thermal coal project with Bandanna Energy in Queensland’s Galilee Basin, made a considerable return on investment from its $A835 million of coal asset sales to Brazilian giant Vale in 2007.
There is some suspicion that Hollows could provide AMCI valuable insight into the old Macarthur assets.
Last month, coal price-crunched Peabody sold a promising Macarthur-era Bowen Basin tenement, mineral development licence 162, to Wesfarmers in a $70 million deal.
In 2010 Macarthur had spent $360 million to acquire a 90% stake in MCG Coal Holdings, which owned MDL162.
Back then MDL162 hosted 221.7 million tonnes of resources and Macarthur aimed to turn the project into an open cut mine with first production after 2014.
The mine was expected to produce both semi-hard coking coal and pulverised coal injection coal, with Macarthur hoping to ramp it up to 6 million tonnes per annum of run of mine output.