Tuesday, 12 December, 2006

by Adrienne Francis
ABC Country Hour

Construction of Compass Resources Browns Oxide Project is continuing this month, and the company hopes to begin mining and processing oxidised copper, nickel and cobalt ore by midway through next year.

But is the company doing anything to address the pressing issues raised by the Batchelor rural community?

The mine's managing director Richard Swann says they have put in place a consultation program.

"We water roads to make sure machinery doesn't generate dust, we are sealing roads. We will be using groundwater from the site and we are required to put in place monitoring of the bores in the properties surrounding us. We haven't been drawing any water before this. We have plenty of time to gather baseline data. Within our mining management plan they have specified a radius of 5 km and we will monitor all those water bodies."

"The monitoring program will determine whether we are having any effect on irrigators, how great it is and what to do about it. We will simply have to cater for them. In our project environmental review, we have to ensure that we can contain any potentially acid forming rocks. We don't believe acid will be a problem, and potentially the risk is greater when the sulphides come on line. We have yet to complete the feasibility study for the sulphide process."

"We don't believe our project will have a significant impact on other businesses. Certainly at the moment there is some fear among residents about the unknown but we plan to demonstrate that we can coexist quite peacefully. We think that property values will go up as people wish to come into the area. I'm talking about all values, some people want to move onto rural blocks. Over recent weeks and months there have been a number of community meetings and we will keep that process going."