Hopeful Taranaki seabed miner retracts billion-dollar earning claim

Friday, 11 October 2024

The mining firm wanting to extract iron sands from the Taranaki seabed has retracted a claim it could make $1 billion annually in export earnings.

The parent company of Trans-Tasman Resources, which is seeking go-ahead for a controversial seabed mining project through the Government’s fast-track scheme, notified the Australian Securities Exchange on Wednesday that its forecast of $1b in annual future revenue had to be retracted as it “does not have a reasonable basis to provide this information”.

“Investors are not to rely on the forecast financial information as a basis for any investment decision concerning the company,” the firm said, in the retraction statement.

While opponents of the project have condemned the mining firm for “making shit up”, Trans-Tasman Resources executive chairman Alan Eggers said the company stood by its assessment that it could earn $1b a year from extracting vanadium from the seabed iron sands.

“There was a compliance issue with the exchange. They weren't aware that we'd done the pre-feasibility study, which had been lodged with them, and when aware of that, they were happy with the paragraph below as a replacement, and on we go. We will produce a billion dollars in export income,” Egger said.

The company has replaced its prior statement with one that does not assert expected income, instead saying that vanadium-rich iron sands had been deemed nationally significant by the New Zealand Government and could contribute to “the Government's resource objective of doubling the value of New Zealand's mineral exports to $2 billion by 2035”.

“There's nothing in it,” Eggers said. He was confident the mining project could extract the expected vanadium, despite opponents conducting a “long, determined campaign of trying to discredit us”.

“We don’t respond to eco-activists and militant iwi.”

Kiwis Against Seabed Mining chairperson Cindy Baxter said, despite what Eggers said, the claim could not be sufficiently evidenced, otherwise such a retraction would not be required.

“That is an admission that they were just making shit up, excuse my language,” she said.

“The company is rushing to advise investors in Australia. But where's the statement in New Zealand? I mean, media have been told this. They've all run it … the public has been told, they've told the Government, but they just make stuff up.”

Baxter questioned whether this $1b claim was before the advisory group which included the seabed mining project on the Government’s list of projects for potential fast-track. The advisory group’s report to Cabinet ministers, published by the Government on Friday, gave no indication of this.

Resources Minister Shane Jones, who has been involved in the fast-track scheme, said the scheme was constructing a statutory consenting process for “those people who want to have a crack”.

“Any applicant or any entity seeking to raise capital and progress with their commercial venture, they've got to make way under their own steam. I really have no comment to make as to the robustness of the figures,” he said.

Jones’ party, NZ First, has been supportive of vanadium mining, specifying under the National-NZ First coalition agreement that a plan for this resource be developed.

“The vanadium properties in the iron sands may, in the future, grow to a high value,” Jones said. “That, however, depends on the market. Fast-track is simply a process enabling applicants to take their chances getting a consent with appropriate conditions.”