The Western Australian government wants the state's last two privately owned coal mines merged into one. Premier Roger Cook said on Wednesday that consolidation of Griffin Coal and Premier Coal, both in the Collie basin, was coming.
"I think it's self-evident that we will see a consolidation," Cook said.
The recommendation came from the Collie Basin Consolidation Taskforce, which the government set up in January and which consulted the mine operators, their lenders, their customers, unions and government agencies before reporting.
Griffin Coal is Indian-owned and has been in receivership since 2022. The state has spent $240 million since then keeping it running, on the basis that letting it stop would have cost jobs and risked supply to the power stations it feeds. Premier Coal is Chinese-owned and supplies the state-owned generators. If the mines merge, the combined operation would also supply Bluewaters, which is privately owned.
That is the shape of the arrangement. Public money has kept a private mine solvent for four years, and the plan now is to merge it with another private mine so a single operator can supply a privately owned power station alongside the state-owned generators, which are being switched off by 2030.
Muja, the state's largest coal-fired plant, closes in 2029. Every state-owned coal station is due to retire by 2030.
The state has committed $700 million to decommissioning and transition, with a further $58 million announced for mine rehabilitation, infrastructure and workforce programs, and $230 million in a Collie Industrial Transition Fund aimed at bringing new employers into the town. Generation Steel, International Graphite and Magnium Australia are each developing projects there.
The jobs are going in the meantime. Premier Coal announced 70 to 100 redundancies in April. Part of the case for the merger is that a single operator could consolidate the two workforces and let older workers retire rather than be made redundant.
Jodie Hanns, the Labor member for Collie-Preston, said the Commonwealth should carry some of the cost. "It is now time for our transitioning workers to be supported by the federal government," she said.
Shadow Energy Minister Steve Thomas said the plan had been announced without detail and warned it could cost hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars on top of what has already been spent.
Neither the government nor the taskforce has published what the merger would cost the state, what the combined entity's ownership structure would be, or what the public receives in return for the $240 million already spent. Cook did not put a timeframe on the consolidation, and no transaction has been announced by either mine's owners.
