Target $4.61, page-4384

Sounds like they have got a dodgy batch of ANFO and the excess NOx was picked up by their air monitoring stations. Should only be a temporary issue. Fertiliser costs are through the roof at the moment due to the energy crisis and it sounds like they tried to cut costs with a cheaper supplier, and it came back to bite them.

Just looking at the blast notifications for Maules, they labelled the latest blast as "2021-93" which presumably means there have been 93 blasts so far in 2021, ie around 100 a year or approx 2 per week. So 6 blasts in just under 4 weeks isn't really much of a drop from normal, it's 1.5 per week instead of 2.

2 blasts per week seems like a lot in my experience, I'm more used to blasts happening about once every 2 weeks depending on where they are in the development of the pits, but Maules is a fairly big mine and I guess they just must need to blast a lot there for geological reasons.

The cynic in me wonders if they could just make each blast a bit bigger and thereby end up blasting the same amount of rock in 6 blasts as they would normally blast in 8. But given their recent troubles with the regulator over various issues they may not wish to risk that.

It probably wouldn't make much difference anyway as the delay will be minimal and at worst they would likely get around it by reshuffling the mine schedule a bit, and avoid basically any loss of production by doing that. The mining engineers might be in for a few late nights and extra cans of Red Bull rewriting the mine schedule but that's probably the worst of it.

Finally, the blast notification page also says they are restricted to a maximum of 4 per week averaged over the calendar year. So once they are cleared to resume, they have plenty of leeway to catch up with extra blasts if they need to. So all in all I would say this is probably a non-issue, apart from possibly seeing a small increase in unit costs due to the extra expense of buying the explosive.