Name: Maules Creek mine.

Location: Maules Creek mine is located in the heart of the Gunnedah basin, in New South Wales, Australia.

Controlling Company: Whitehaven Coal owns 75% and is the operator of the mine; ICRA MC, owns a 15% share in the mine and is an entity associated with Itochu Corporation; J-Power Australia own 10% of the mine.

Brief Description: The Maules Creek is one of the last major undeveloped and significant multiseam coal deposits in New South Wales and is expected to sustain a potential project life of more then 30 years. It is approved to extract up to 13-million tonnes of coal a year. The mine, when operating at its annualised design capacity of 12-million tonnes a year of saleable coal in 2018, will double Whitehaven’s coal production to more than 23-million tonnes a year, making the company the largest independent coal producer in Australia.

Brief History: Whitehaven’s newest mine, Maules Creek was fully approved in July 2013. It started railing coal in December 2014, less than a year after construction started. First coal sales occured on Friday 9 January 2015.

Commercial production at the Maules Creek mine started in June 2016.

Products: High-quality, low-ash, low-sulphur and low-phosphorus semisoft coking coal and low-ash, low-sulphur, high-energy thermal coal.

Geology/Mineralisation: Maules Creek is located within the Permian sedimentary sequence of the Maules Creek sub-basin in the Gunnedah basin of New South Wales. The sub-basin uncomformably overlies (onlaps) a basement surface formed by the early Permian Boggabri volcanics. Structurally, the seams are deposited in a generally north–south orientated basin that shallows to the south but is open ended to the north. The Maules Creek resource is situated on the western limb of the basin, which dips to the east-south-east at grades of 2 to 6, with areas of local steepening.

Reserves: Total opencut proven and propbable reserves at Maules Creek as at August 2016, were estimated at 510-million tonnes of coal.

Resources: Total opencut mineral resources at Maules Creek as at August 2016, were estimated at 660-million tonnes of coal.

Mining Method: Opencut.

Major Infrastructure and Equipment: Maules Creek is a boxcut mine using conventional truck-and-shovel methods. The project will recover all 15 opencut mineable coal seams in the mining sequence.

The major mining fleet at the project comprises Hitachi EX3600 and EX8000 excavators, EH5000 trucks, Caterpillar 789D trucks, and other ancillary fleet machines.

The run-of-mine (RoM) coal is hauled to the RoM stockpile and delivered to the crushing facility.

Coal is either washed or bypassed at the coal handling and processing plant, which has a capacity of 1 600 t/h. The washed coal is blended with bypass coal to produce uniform products.

Saleable product coal is transported by trains to the Port of Newcastle for export either as metallurgical coal or premium, low-ash thermal coal.

Prospects: The 10.5-million-tonne-a year ramp-up at Maules Creek is on schedule for the second half of the 2017 financial year.

The first excavator required for the ramp-up started operating in the September 2016 quarter.

Expansion to the 400-m-wide panel at Narrabri is on schedule to start production in the second half of the 2017 financial year.

Contact Person: GM investor relations Ian McAleese.

Contact Details:
Whitehaven Coal
Tel +61 2 8507 9700
Fax +61 2 8507 9701
Website http://www.whitehavencoal.com.au