PERTH (miningweekly.com) – The New South Wales Planning Assessment Commission (PAC) has again backed mining giant Rio Tinto's plans to extend work at its Warkworth opencut coal mine.

While the PAC in March formally recommended that the Minister of Planning approve Rio’s expansion plans for the Mount Thorley Warkworth mine, Minister Rob Stokes in August requested the PAC carry out a second review on the project to include amendments to the State Environmental Planning Policy (SEPP).

The amendments to the SEPP would remove a provision making the significance of the resource the principal consideration when determining mining projects.

Besides the main focus of the second review, which was to incorporate the SEPP amendment, other new issues, including Aboriginal stakeholder consultation and the cumulative impacts of final voids, were also raised, which required further consideration and clarification, the PAC said this week.

In its second approval of the Warkworth extension project, the PAC made six recommendations for the project’s approval, including the strengthening of relative management plans to ensure ongoing monitoring of the Warkworth Sands Woodlands regeneration activities, the strengthening of conditions around future management of final voids and further consideration of the social-impact assessment.

“The commission is satisfied that the project’s benefits, as currently understood, outweigh its potential impacts and that the project is, on balance, approvable. The project should proceed to determination,” the PAC said.

Rio was in June 2014 forced to release a new planning application for the extension project, after the New South Wales Court of Appeal refused an appeal against the New South Wales Land and Environment Court’s decision to overturn a 2012 development consent for the extension of the project.

Instead of a single development approval, Rio split the approval application into two separate developments.

The Warkworth continuation project would involve an extension of the mining time period and footprint of the existing Warkworth opencut mine, involving the extraction of an additional 230-million tonnes of run-of-mine (RoM) coal, over a 21-year period, at a rate of 18-million tonnes of coal a year.

The Mount Thorley continuation project would involve the continuation of the existing opencut mining operations at a rate of up to ten-million tonnes a year RoM coal, with extraction expected to continue until 2022.