Dual-listed Bathurst has raised about $242 million for the project, which covers 10,000ha of tenements, and has spent more than $100 million getting to this stage.
Bathurst has enjoyed a relatively dream entry to New Zealand since 2010, with successful mergers and acquisitions, listing and capital-raising, rising share value, getting permits and having gained the co-operation of neighbour, state-owned enterprise Solid Energy, to forge mutually beneficial infrastructure operations.
While environmentalists remain adamant any form of coal or lignite use is an unpalatable backward step, Bathurst is seen as a poster business of investment to give New Zealand an economic boost.
The three-week appeal period might be its final hurdle before embarking on production from an estimated 90 million tonnes of coking coal, a key ingredient in the steel-making process which has seen emerging economies push prices to record levels during the past two years.
Bathurst received its consent approvals last Friday, about a year after lodging the applications to the Buller District Council and West Coast Regional Council.
Marianne Rogers, general manager of Bathurst subsidiary Buller Coal, said at the New Zealand branch of the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (AusIMM) conference in Queenstown, she could not estimate if any appeal would delay the targeted December production start.
During a presentation at the AusIMM conference yesterday, she was asked if all the conditions accompanying the consents were palatable to Bathurst: "Yes, 99.9% of the conditions are what was proffered [by Bathurst], and two others are relatively inconsequential," she said.
Bathurst wants to annually mine two million tonnes of hard coking coal from about 200ha near Westport on the West Coast, from the southern escarpment on the Denniston plateau.
Ms Rogers described the Denniston plateau as having a "stunning and stark beauty" about it.
She said rehabilitation of millions of tonnes of overburden would, to the untrained eye, not be noticeably different from natural adjacent scenery once the overburden had been contoured and replanted.
"It will end up looking like the original landscape," she said of a conceptual rehabilitation plan used at the Resource Management Act hearing.
A coal-processing plant on the plateau will break down the coal into slurry form, before it is delivered to the coast via an 11km, 300mm-diameter steel pipeline. The pipeline will be raised off the ground so as not to impede protected snails in the area.
The coal will either be railed to Lyttelton for export, or loaded at Westport Harbour on a coastal ship for delivery to Taranaki, then on to Panama Canal-sized vessels for export.
Water management was one of the biggest issues in the application process, with seven metres of annual rainfall to deal with, its own waste water plant and also "acid water" left over from earlier mining operations, which can wash off the high plateau carrying minerals, Ms Rogers said.
Still to be decided were the Department of Conservation access permits, possibly by November, and the concession to operate the pipeline, but Ms Rogers said it was unclear what the timetable for that announcement was.
The Fairdown-Whareatea Residents Association said it would appeal the decision.
They were happy about the mine's economic benefits to Buller, they remained unhappy with the location of both the coal stockpile and processing plant.
The association said the commissioners' decision had not met any of the association's 90 members' concerns about having the coal-handling facility in the midst of a heavily populated rural community.
"It appears that rocks on Denniston have been given more consideration than people and property," association spokesman Tony Peet said.
• Reporter Simon Hartley is a guest of AusIMM
