Glencore has shelved development of a A$2 billion ($1.3 billion) coal mine in Australia’s Queensland state given global uncertainties and a hike in state royalties that damaged investor confidence, it said on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The miner had been in a permitting process for the Valeria mine in the Bowen Basin, which would have produced up to 20 million tonnes of thermal and metallurgical coal a year, and was part of a package it bought from Rio Tinto Ltd for $1.7 billion in 2018.<\/p>\n
Its decision comes against a backdrop of uncertainty over the speed of global decarbonisation and as project finance has become harder to find for greenfield coal mines – those that are not expansions of existing projects.<\/p>\n
“Glencore has decided to withdraw the Valeria coal project from the current approvals process and will place the project under review,” it said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“The decision has been made in the current context of increased global uncertainty,” it said, adding the move was in line with its commitment “to a responsibly managed decline of our global coal business and our ambition of being a net zero total emissions business by 2050.”<\/p>\n
Queensland, also home to coal mines owned by majors BHP Group Ltd, Anglo American PLC and Peabody Energy Corp, in June ended a 10-year freeze on royalty rates and raised them to capture windfall profit.<\/p>\n
The state on Wednesday forecast a record surplus of A$5.2 billion for the current financial year, largely driven by the higher royalty payments.<\/p>\n
“Governments are already benefiting from higher royalty and corporate tax revenue from the Australian coal sector,” a Glencore spokesperson added.<\/p>\n
“Abrupt decisions like the Queensland super royalty hike have damaged investor confidence, increased uncertainty and raised a red flag with key trading partners,” he said.<\/p>\n
Australia is expected to announce caps on gas and coal prices before Christmas, possibly in the coming days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Glencore has shelved development of a A$2 billion ($1.3 billion) coal mine in Australia’s Queensland state given global uncertainties and a hike in state royalties that damaged investor confidence, it said on Thursday. The miner had been in a permitting process for the Valeria mine in the Bowen Basin, which would have produced up to 20 million tonnes of thermal and metallurgical coal a year, and was part of a package it bought from Rio Tinto Ltd for $1.7 billion in 2018. Its decision comes against a backdrop of uncertainty over the speed of global decarbonisation and as project finance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[131],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-541868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}