A technology-led turnaround made for TV
- 15 November 2024
Tests of mining’s circa-2025 ESG credentials don’t come much bigger than the Mount Morgan gold-copper mine in north Queensland, Australia, a site with a past so rich it would make for a great Netflix documentary.
In fact, all going to plan, the mine said to have paid Australia’s debt for a few years at the turn of last century will be part of the streaming service’s content line-up soon.
It’s all part of a bigger plot by the head of privately-owned Heritage Minerals and GreenGold Technology to shine a light on the good and bad aspects of Mount Morgan’s remarkable history, generate long-term jobs and training for local townspeople who’ve been disappointed by industry prophets many times before and, of course, try to recover an estimated $4 billion of gold still held at a site that yielded more than 250 tonnes of the yellow metal in its chequered past.
For Malcolm Paterson, Mount Morgan is certainly a potential commercial bonanza. But it’s evident that for him cracking the techno-economic code that has stopped his predecessors in their tracks and unlocking environmental, social and – maybe very broad – governance benefits is a hugely compelling project.
“Everybody can see there is gold and them thar hills,” MinterEllison partner Tim Hanmore said in a conversation with Paterson at IMARC 2024 in Sydney, Australia.
“The difficulty has been getting it out of the tailings that it rests in.”
Gold, salvation for an industry that has got a lot right and wrong at the Queensland mine; even dinosaur footprints in an old clay pit. There is a lot of intrigue in the hills around the place known as Ironstone Mountain before it became a gold rush town.
Hanmore, who has worked with Heritage Minerals on the approval and redevelopment of Mount Morgan, says the site is a test case for modern technology, private and public partnering around abandoned mines, and new regulation of mine tailings reprocessing projects.
Around the world about 100 gigatonnes of mine waste is being produced each year and the industry’s existing mine waste footprint is estimated at more than 50,000 square kilometres.
The Queensland state budget leaks at least $2 million a year from its long-term exposure to Mount Morgan site remediation costs.
“It's costing them millions of dollars every year to treat the water before it goes into the [Dee] river,” Paterson said.
“And there’s no end to it.
“We're talking about hundreds of years of ongoing treatment.
“Unless you fix the problem it’s there forever. Part of our long-term plan is fixing the site so we can stop that ongoing financial liability.”
Hanmore said from a governance standpoint the Queensland Government’s agreement with Heritage was pivotal to enabling a small company to contemplate and get backing for a regeneration plan at a site with such a huge financial liability hanging over it.
“It’s a pretty innovative approach,” he said.
“It’s a bespoke agreement related to redevelopment of an abandoned mine. It's only available at this stage at this one site and it really has helped unlock the potential because it allocates rehabilitation liability in a sensible way.
“It's a forward-looking document that allows the company to proceed with confidence and the state of Queensland knows what it is going to get and what it isn't going to get out of the redevelopment.
“That was a fundamental document that led to the acquisition of the project.
“It’s not something that's been rolled out more broadly but it’s something that could also form part of the case for other projects around the world, [many of which] need a bespoke approach to rehabilitation and liability management.”
Paterson said Mount Morgan would be the definitive test case for GreenGold’s proprietary ReCYN resin-based technology, which is both key to detoxifying water discharge from the site and the economics of reprocessing tailings.
“Cyanide is a dirty word to most people but we decided years ago that it is still the best lixiviant for gold and silver,” he said.
“A lot of people have tried alternatives and they've not been very successful.
“We decided we would accept cyanide as the lixiviant but make it environmentally friendly. We don't let cyanide out of the circuit, we recycle it internally with our technology.
“This allows us to reduce operating costs but there’s always a problem with copper in these ores and that causes high cyanide consumption. So what we do is we recover that copper and the cyanide so our tailings are clean.
“We put clean tailings out to the dam.
“We started this company, GreenGold, five years ago and we’re probably halfway through proving the technology.
“The mining industry is conservative and I can understand why. There's such big money involved. It takes a long time to move to something new even if it's obviously better.
“We are starting to make inroads into the mining industry in various parts of the world now.
“But Mount Morgan will provide the demonstration map for this technology.”
Hanmore said the “GreenGold difference” could have significant implications for that tiny company, for Heritage Minerals and for the Mount Morgan township.
“The Dee River is a beautiful river system upstream of Mount Morgan,” he said.
“It is absolutely stunning.
“Downstream it is yellow and black; it’s sulphuric … and that’s because lower-lying areas of the mine were used for tailings disposal [historically]. These gullies being the water courses that run into the Dee River downstream.
“The environmental benefit of reprocessing the tailings using GreenGold technologies will be astounding.
“It’s one of the reasons I say this project really is an ESG professional's dream.
“An exciting twist that’s come up recently is that Malcolm and his team have identified the potential for a very significant sulphuric acid manufacturing opportunity in the co-products that are found in the Mount Morgan resource. Again, a positive and really sustainable story for acid production in central Queensland.”
Paterson said Heritage was working with government agencies to insert Mount Morgan into classroom history lessons. It was already training young locals to work at its proposed operation.
He thinks a new chapter in Mount Morgan’s story will be one the town’s residents will be happy to talk about.
“We are the fifth company in 35 years to try and get this project off the ground,” he said.
“We have taken a different approach … and we've got full support from the community. And it's not just the local community it's also the local government and the state government.
“I think it’s partly because of the story that we tell and the passionate belief we have in that story. It's not just about producing gold and copper.”
Plenty of fodder for a Netflix documentary.
Stay tuned.
