UK approves first coal mine in 30 years in a win for Owen Hegarty

Hans van Leeuwen Europe correspondent

Dec 8, 2022 – 7.45am (Sydney time)

London | Australian mining investor Owen Hegarty’s £165 million ($300 million) punt on a British coalmine has paid off, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government giving the controversial project a green light.

Mr Hegarty’s bet is on West Cumbria Mining, which has won an eight-year campaign to open the country’s first new coal mine in three decades – a project that will extract up to 2.7 million tonnes a year of metallurgical, or coking, coal until 2049.

WCM is majority-owned by Melbourne-based EMR Capital, a private equity group set up and run by Mr Hegarty, a former Rio Tinto executive and founder of Oxiana.

Britain’s planning minister, Michael Gove, approved the proposal late on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT), after former prime minister Boris Johnson and his ministers had sat on it for the best part of two years – raising doubts about whether it would ever go ahead.

Gove was a key Brexit architect.

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CarrZee: Note the British coal is higher quality than the Aussie stuff: