Officials said that the Agencia Nacional de Mineria green-lighted Plan de Trabajo y Obras, and it was seeking environmental permit approvals for the property.

“New Colombia believes approval of the work plan will greatly increase the interest in the company,” the company said, noting that it is taking care to work closely with authorities to bring the operation into production as soon as possible.

In the meantime, it will submit the permit application for extraction of raw building materials in the next few weeks and will begin extraction immediately after.

“The company believes [it] can have approval of the coal environmental permit in Q1 and expects to generate revenue within the first half of Q1,” officials said.

“The cash flow generated from the raw building materials allows [us] to finance…coal operations on better terms.”

The drill plan will also make progress when NCR retains drillers to implement the plan, and those work results will be used to finish the property’s National Instrument 43-101 technical report.

“The approval of the work permit by the ANM is a huge step forward in our efforts to begin coal production,” president John Campo said.

“I'm very confident we're making the right contacts to develop over 4000 ha of mostly metallurgical coal available to us.”