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Gina Rinehart’s $646m Canadian coal play has mountains to scale after a rocky start

An unbroken string of court and regulatory losses makes Gina Rinehart’s Canadian coal play a black hole worth $646 million and counting.

Despite Rio Tinto’s $3 billion write-off arising from its reckless 2010 purchase of Riversdale Mining and its landlocked African coal play named Benga, the mining magnate must have believed that this time she could trust the Riversdale boys. 

She seems to have accepted the assurances of their reincarnated “Riversdale Resources” that the re-opening of its Grassy Mountain metallurgical coal property in the Canadian Rocky Mountains would surely be approved. (It also appears she may not have gotten the hint from Riversdale’s naughty naming of its Canadian operation “Benga” in homage to the Rio Tinto caper.) The property had been exhaustively mined until the 1960s and abandoned as uneconomical, leaving an ugly mess of waste rock and water-filled pits.

Unusually for Canadian mining schemes, the Benga application was denied by federal and provincial regulators in 2021. The grounds for denial were Benga’s lack of a credible plan to prevent selenium contamination of surface water and Benga’s exaggerated estimate of the property’s residual coal. Now, five years after enriching Riversdale’s principals Michael O’Keeffe and Steve Mallyon with her $646 million takeover, Grassy Mountain remains a money pit.

Rinehart renamed Benga “Northback” (a clumsy amalgam of Canada’s comical reputation as “The Great White North” and the tired cliché of Australia as a barren wilderness).