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Thrumyeyes

Nice post. While I don't really agree with some parts, I give you a tu for the argument behind it.

As far as the mining licence and EIS are concerned. The draft EIS was written mainly in house with contribution on technical issues eg water, flora and fauna and design of civil works etc from external consultants.

I would guess this saved the company a low six figure expenditure and that is to be commended. Whether they should have just farmed the whole process out to an environmental consultancy and paid the fees can be debated, although the intent at the time was probably on the mark.

If you look at the notice of intent, you will see that the original design was to place waste rock dumps to the east of the proposed pit. This was in an area of known mulgara + bilby activity, hence the majority of the design was moved to the west of the pits where no recent activity was detected in flora and fauna surveys.

I believe that following trial mine, evidence of the ore veins tending to the west emerged. These could quite easily go under the proposed tailings dams and waste rock dumps and as mentioned I think by Bob, would be very expensive to relocate down the track.

I think that the delay in responding to the EIS was largely as a result of this possibility and the extra cash offered by Pac Road was taken to perform detailed sterilisation drilling prior to finalising mine design as well as to take advantage of other resource drilling opportunities at the same time.

Last Mondays presentation states that EIS response will be issued within two weeks (ie by cob, Darwin time Fri 28 March). I would expect this to happen, however whether it will be the final revision or will just be lodged to keep the process underway is unknown. The final mine plan can be altered after submission of EIS response, so this may be the plan.

IMO, if the EIS response is not lodged by this coming Friday, then there is a significant issue somewhere.

Just to confirm, at present NTEPA are not holding up the mining licence process. ABU response to the draft EIS is the holdup at present.

As far as management predictions of when ML would be granted etc, I really don't know. I think they found the process far more involved than they initially envisaged which probably agrees with your theory of essentially management lacking experience in this part of the project.

Anyway, I'll be waiting for release (or not as the case may be) of EIS response before making any more significant judgements.