by Rosemary Penwarden

Bathurst Resources’ (BRL) shareholders were treated to a tale from fantasy land last week. The fantasy is that Bathurst’s newly acquired coal exploration permit near Waimate will service Fonterra’s expanding Studholme milk drying plant, reported an energy trade news service.

What Bathurst doesn’t appear to understand is that the new Studholme plant is never going to be built. At their consent hearing a year ago Fonterra downgraded their grandiose plan from a ten-fold expansion of the current setup to a four-fold one, but even that will now never go ahead. There isn’t the milk – cow numbers are down by about half a million and those would have to be restored before even the existing capacity would be fully used.

Much can change in a year; public opinion for one. New Zealanders have had enough of shit in our rivers and aquifers. Public opinion is firming against more cows – even against the number we have now. The evidence about water keeps mounting and being better understood.

Fonterra are feeling that. They themselves reported in big type in a farming paper a few months ago that their capital works programme is now complete. The Studholme expansion is a fizzer.

Is Bathurst trying to claim to potential investors that it has bright prospects? “Build it (mine it) and they will come”?

Public opinion is also firming against coal. We cannot keep burning coal and meet our agreed commitments on climate change. We cannot keep burning coal and hold any kind of integrity on the world stage. We cannot keep burning coal while people around the world die because of climate change.

Bathurst dance around this moral dilemma in their latest piece of fabricated nonsense: “We have employed a strategy of developing assets as close to existing or future markets for a number of years, as evidenced by our Canterbury Coal mine,” he [CEO Richard Tacon] says. “This is an extension of that strategy. This reduces transport distance from source to use and saves cost but also reduces the greenhouse gas footprint of the industrial use.”

While Fonterra still use coal in every one of their factories in the South Island, peak cow is over. Even Fonterra see that. Bathurst is trying to talk up a dud.

Fonterra’s coal use is the only reason Bathurst exists. Pretty soon Bathurst will have to find their way out of fantasy land and back to reality. A new coal mine is as much use as tits on a bull.