The program will focus on the Wintinna Deposit area to determine the feasibility of coal extraction by opencut mining methods to supply a coal-to-liquids and power cogeneration plant.
Altona chairman Chris Lambert said the drilling program was an important step in the feasibility study and is expected to enable Altona to define a JORC-compliant resource to underpin the Arckaringa Project.
“As soon as this program and the associated coal technical assessments are completed, we will be in a strong position to commercialise the project," Lambert said.
Past drilling at the Wintinna Deposit has defined a total resource of over 3.5 billion tonnes of coal.
The new exploration program will allow classification of at least 700 million tonnes of coal from within the resource.
The project feasibility study base case requires the supply of 10Mt of coal per annum to produce 10 million barrels of CTL products annually for up to 50 years, a total coal requirement of 500Mt over the project life.
