NSW signs off on a coal giant and calls it transition

New South Wales has found a tidy way to describe a very untidy decision. The Independent Planning Commission has approved the Hunter Valley Operations Continuation Project, letting coal mining near Singleton continue until 2045, even though climate groups had spent months warning that the project amounts to a carbon bomb with a planning file attached.

The commission was not short of material. More than 10,000 public submissions, along with arguments from climate and environment groups, unions, state authorities and the mine owners, Glencore and Yancoal, were weighed in the process. The IPC accepted that the mine’s greenhouse gas emissions will contribute to climate change impacts on people, the economy and the environment in the Hunter region, across NSW and globally. Its answer was familiar enough: the damage is outweighed by the benefits.

Those benefits, in the commission’s view, are economic stability, continued employment, support for local business and ongoing royalties and tax revenue. The IPC also said the project would help provide an orderly transition for workers, businesses and communities as the coal industry changes over time. In other words, coal gets to stay because coal is still useful. Planning jargon, as ever, has a way of making hard choices sound almost virtuous.

The scale of the project explains why the reaction was so sharp. Over its life, HVO estimates that 809 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent will be released. About 794 million tonnes of that would come from burning the coal overseas, and 87 per cent of those emissions would come from power plants, according to material the company presented to the commission. The NSW Net Zero Commission had already warned that approving the mine could affect the state’s ability to meet climate targets and urged the planning authority to consider the full impact of emissions, including those from overseas combustion.

That warning was not treated as decisive. The IPC said HVO must prepare a plan to manage emissions from burning the coal overseas and limit exports to jurisdictions with greenhouse gas policies consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement. The project still needs federal environmental approval, which is expected before the end of the year. HVO said it is engaging with the national environmental protection agency to secure federal approval by the end of December 2026.

For climate groups, the decision was less a balancing act than a surrender. Georgina Woods of the Lock the Gate Alliance called it a catastrophic failure of the New South Wales planning system to protect people from the worst impacts of global warming. Rising Tide said it was the largest climate policy failure in NSW history. The Climate Council had already described the project as a climate bomb that would supercharge climate disasters, while former NSW Fire and Rescue commissioner Greg Mullins pointed out that what NSW exports as coal comes back as bushfires, floods, heatwaves and droughts.

The political fallout is unlikely to fade quickly. The NSW Nature Conservation Council said it was Chris Minns’ biggest climate failure as premier, while the state Greens’ Sue Higginson called the approval an absolute betrayal of the science and said she would not be surprised if it ends up in court. HVO, for its part, called the decision a pivotal milestone for 1,500 mine workers, their families and the regional economy. The NSW Minerals Council, never one to miss a chance, urged the government to change the law and narrow the scope for legal challenge from climate activists.

What this leaves is a familiar Australian contradiction: a government and planning system that speak fluently about transition while approving the infrastructure that delays it. The Hunter Valley mine has operated for 75 years, and the commission has now decided that longevity counts for something. Whether that is prudence or simply habit dressed up as policy will depend on how much faith one still has in institutions that claim to arbitrate between climate science and coal receipts.

Written by Andreas Hofer andreas.hofer@alpineweekly.com