PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Diversified miner Glencore has partnered with privately held Bloomfield Group to acquire the Integra coal complex, in New South Wales, from Brazilian major Vale for an undisclosed amount.

Under the terms of the binding agreements already signed, Bloomfield would acquire the Integra opencut operation, along with the wash plant and rail loop facilities, while Glencore would acquire the underground operations.

Glencore would have the right to use the wash plant and rail loop facilities on a cost-plus basis.

“The Integra underground lease lies immediately to the south of Glencore’s existing coal operations. This acquisition provides Glencore with future optionality to realise synergies from adjoining tenements,” said Glencore Australia head of coal operations Ian Cribb.

“While the Integra underground mine has been a profitable semi-hard coking coal mine in the past, it was placed on care and maintenance in 2014, and Glencore has no plans to restart the operation in the near term.”

Cribb said that, instead, Glencore intended to evaluate a number of options for the Integra underground mine in the months to come.

The underground operations hold a reserve of some 35-million tonnes of semi-hard coking coal and have an approved production rate of 4.5-million tonnes run-of-mine a year.

The opencut operation has the capacity to produce 3.6-million tonnes a year of thermal and semi-soft coking coal, with the coal railed to the Port of Newcastle.

Bloomfield has said the opencut mine would be renamed Rix Creek North and would run as a bolt-on operation to the company’s Rix's Creek business, which is adjacent to the south.

“Combining the Integra opencut into our Rix’s Creek operations can deliver synergies in administration and overall operations. We would envisage spending the remainder of 2015 working through a number of issues before mining at Integra opencut can resume on a modest scale,” Bloomfield MD John Richards said.