Saturday 1st April 2006
ABC NT Local News

A US resource company says a mine planned for Batchelor, south of Darwin, could supply 10 per cent of the world's cobalt market within three to four years.

Compass Resources has collected enough capital to fund the copper, cobalt and nickel mine, which it says will produce an initial cash flow of $86 million a year.

It hopes to start construction on the open-pit mine in the next few months.

Company chairman Gordon Toll says yesterday's meetings with the Northern Territory Government were very encouraging.

"Before we can start up, we have to finish our public environmental review process and write our management plan, satisfy the NT EPA [Environmental Protection Authority]. We're in the home stretches on that," he said.

"Hopefully we'll start construction as soon as the wet season has left us."

Mr Toll says an environmental impact statement is not needed for the initial project.

"There's been a lot of mining in the area immediately adjacent to where we will be mining and the ruling from both the NT Government and the Federal Government was that we needed only to do a public environmental review... It's a very rigorous process," he said.