The company announced its maiden drilling results for one of the Jambi project’s three concessions Wednesday, adding that it was working hard towards monetizing the operation with a feasibility study underway.

Drilling has resulted in estimated JORC-indicated and inferred coal resources of 94 million tons in Block 9 of the tenement in central Tebo district in Jambi, eastern Sumatra.

The 9000m drilling program is being conducted by eight rigs over a 6km strike distance. Indus said an ongoing drilling program would continue to further define and increase resources, with the hope of moving some indicated resources to the measured category.

Assays returned to date for the concession’s key coal seam have indicated consistent gross calorific values values of 5000-5400 per kilogram, confirmed from 28 core holes.

Indus executive director Vinay Hariani said the drilling has returned “an outstanding result for Indus and exceeds our expectations”

“The ongoing drilling program will define further and extend the indicated resource category. Indus will release an updated coal resource estimation for Block 9 when further drilling and assaying has been completed.

“We are working very closely with GMS on the mining engineering and the completion of a feasibility study for the opening of a coal mine on Block 9, which produces 2Mtpa of thermal coal.

“Preliminary mine planning has commenced by modeling a first open pit in order to mine coal over a strike distance of 2.8km in length across a width of about 500m.”

The planned mine is slated to be a low-cost open-pit operation producing export-grade thermal coal for Chinese and Indian markets, Indus said.