He called the mine opening on Monday a sign of hope for the industry and said he was there to affirm his faith and confidence in it.

“Coal is essential for the prosperity of the world,” Abbott said.

“Energy is what sustains prosperity and coal is the world’s principal energy source and it will be for many decades to come.”

While he warned that a change of government would bring back the carbon and mining taxes he helped abolish, Abbott also flagged that coal-fired power could make a comeback.

“Sure, coal is a source of emissions but it’s also a source of energy and there can be no prosperity without energy and modern power stations are increasingly environmentally friendly and that’s what we should be working towards: a more efficient, more effective use of coal, because that way we get reduced emissions intensity but we also get the prosperity that people right around the world depend upon,” Abbott said at the event.

While both Caval Ridge and its sister mine Daunia have both received political and community criticism for being based on using 100% fly-in, fly-out operations, Abbott took BMA’s side on the issue.

“If you look at BMA’s mines, they’ve got eight mines here in this region – six of them have local staff, two of them are fly-in, fly-out,” he said.

“That’s a reasonably balanced situation and as I understand it, the economics of this mine worked with fly-in, fly-out, they weren’t going to work on a different basis and I want this mine to go ahead.

“I want this mine to go ahead and if it’s going to go ahead it’s got to have economics that work.”

Abbott was disappointed with China’s decision to reintroduce coal import taxes from this week but said the news highlighted the importance of pursuing free trade agreement negotiations with China.

“They went nowhere for six years under the former government,” he said.

“They’ve been accelerated under this government and I very much hope we can land them at or before the G20 in Brisbane next month.”

Abbott also made the claim that he would “shirtfront” Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin over flight MH17 matters during the question session at the mine – with this snippet gathering the most media coverage.

Caval Ridge is initially targeting up to 5.5 million tonnes per annum of premium metallurgical coal.

BHP said the $US3.4 billion ($A3.9 billion) mine was delivered below budget and produced first coal three months ahead of schedule.

The mine also created about 500 operational jobs.

BMA is yet to provide a timeline for implementing its proposed 700 job cuts and is still calling for voluntary redundancies.

Last month BMA’s workforce numbers included 6000 employees and 5000 contractors.

BMA is a 50:50 joint venture of BHP and Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi.