New Age Exploration has been granted an underground licence over a major coking coal project in the UK.
The Lochinvar licence approved by the UK Coal Authority, is located near Carlisle, spanning 67.5km² in the Canonbie coalfield and is the company’s first coal acquisition outside of Colombia.
Lochinvar has an exploration target of 330 to 410 million tons of potential coking and pulverised coal injection (PCI) in the semi-hard to hard coking coal range.
Access agreements are already inked with two surface owners for proposed mine surface facilities and exploration activities in the licence in which the company will have a 100% interest.
The quality of the coal is expected to be a high volatile, high calorific value, low ash, modest to high sulphur coal with high swell indices.
Historic drilling and seismic testing indicated multiple seams including the Nine Foot Seam with thickness of 2m and coal seams to start at 100m depth from the surface.
Lochinvar is served by extensive infrastructure including a railway line within 16km providing access to multiple ports and steelworks.
New Age will leverage European markets to market coking coal which are currently importing coking it from Australia, the US and Canada while delineation of initial JORC resource is anticipated within 12 months.
New Age Exploration managing director Gary Fietz said Lochinvar was identified by the company’s in-house business development team and has been secured at minimal cost through a competitive application process from the UK Coal Authority.
"As such, there are no vendor payments and our funds only need to be used to define and develop the project and not on any vendor or third party payments," Gary added.
"The "concealed" nature of the deposit and the timing of its discovery and exploration during a long period of the wholesale decline in the UK coal industry are good indicators as to why Lochinvar has remained unexploited until now."