indigenous group fears csg impact on mount mul, page-29

Thx idlehands...I think the points IK makes below are very important. They specify why Exergen and MNM drilled BM and why BM is so important/valuable........this is from the horses mouth.....

"Mr KRAEMER — There are two or three issues. One is obviously, firstly, that we look for a commercial opportunity. The Latrobe Valley is all tied up by major companies with 30- or 40-year mining licences. The existing power station owns them. Monash Energy, HRL and the other two got the allocation under the ETIS. It is a major deposit on a global scale, and it is already in an industrial area, but it is constrained export-wise by there being no infrastructure, and it is tens or hundreds of billions, or whatever it is, to develop that. In my company you are looking for outcomes over a three to six-year period, not decades, otherwise you cannot get investment in your process. Bacchus Marsh, however — albeit it is a smaller deposit, something of the order of 1 billion or 2 billion, versus 20 billion to 40 billion or 60 billion tonnes, or however you want to cut that up — does not have the infrastructure constraints that the Latrobe Valley does in generating an export market. It requires hundreds of millions of dollars to develop technology to clean up coal, and offshore investment companies from China and India are willing to pay those dollars to get coal supply and lower emissions coal supply. The particular circumstance at Bacchus Marsh leads to an easier commercial outcome to get upgraded coal to market because it has a rail there, the Port of Geelong with capacity and it does not have the eastern Melbourne sprawl. If you are ever going to develop the Latrobe Valley, how are you going to do it infrastructure-wise for bulk commodities? I guess — albeit one is a big deposit and the other is a little deposit — there are other commercial issues that say the Latrobe Valley one involves a lot of hard yards. As far as the issue about swapping deposits, it is first I have heard of it."