Adani CEO Lucas Dow steps down

The boss of Adani’s controversial Carmichael coal mine has stepped aside, but will remain in a non-executive director role at the company.

Adani Mining CEO Lucas Dow at the Bowen Basin Mining Club luncheon in Mackay.

Lucas Dow, the boss of Adani’s controversial Carmichael coal mine has stepped aside, with the company saying he will now take a non-executive director role.

Mr Dow joined Adani in 2018 after development of the Indian company’s coal mine had stalled in the face of vocal opposition from environmentalists, and after the Queensland government had said it would block Adani’s attempt to win discounted financing from the federal government’s Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility.

The former BHP executive slimmed down the project from a $16.5bn, 60 million tonne a year behemoth to a far smaller mine capable of exporting 10 to 15m tonnes of thermal coal each year with a capital cost of $2bn, and helped get the company’s approval and permitting processes back on track.

Mr Dow will make way for another former BHP executive, David Boshoff, who joined the company late last year as its project director after spending five years running BHP’s Mt Arthur thermal coal mine.

Adani’s annual accounts, lodged on May 25 with the Australian Securities & Investments Commission, said the miner remained confident it would begin producing coal in the 2021-2022 fiscal year despite the impact of the coronavirus.

Construction work on the project kicked off just over a year ago, and Adani says it has now handed out more than $1bn worth of contracts at the mine.

This week it hired Mackay-based contractor G&S Engineering for the design and construction of the coal handling plant at the mine, and last month the company signed a $350m contract with Queensland’s BMD group for civil earthworks on a 200km rail spur linking the mine to Queensland‘s existing coal rail network.

Its annual financial accounts show it booked an annual after-tax loss of $279m after spending $142.1m on work at Carmichael in the year to March 31, and booking a $283m foreign exchange loss in the period.