Located north of its existing Mackenzie South operations, the project is about 30 kilometres northeast of the Blackwater township and covers a total area of 1951.3 hectares.

Construction of the mine is expected to take around 12 months and is notionally slated to begin in mid 2013, but Jellinbah noted it could start earlier.

With 130Mt of resources, the mine aims to on average produce about 2Mtpa of product coal out of the Rangal Coal Measures, mainly consisting of pulverised coal-injection coal, along with some thermal coal.

Mining will consist of convention open pit techniques using excavators and trucks for overburden removal, extraction and haulage.

A proposed modular crushing plant on-site will reduce the mined coal to sizes of below 50 millimetres, where it will either be trucked to the Jellinbah mine for further processing or to the train loader at the Boonal rail siding.

The company will rail the coal through to the RG Tanna coal terminal at Gladstone for export to its existing, and new, customers.

Construction will cover typical items, such as a run-of-mine pad, haul roads, conveyors, stockpiles, along with power and administrative infrastructure.

However, the project will also need to build a bridge for access across the Mackenzie River to the Jellinbah mine.

There are several species of endangered flora in the project area, while endangered fauna includes the Bridled Nailtail Wallaby and the Star Finch, which are accompanied by the vulnerable Large-eared Pied Bat.

The federal application was made to meet the requirements of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.

Stakeholders of the private company include Tremell (40.08%), Queensland Coal Mine Management (29.92%), Maurebeni Coal (15%) and Catherine Hill Resources (15%).