Diggers and Dealers: Is BHP’s Eddy Haegel brushing up on his French?
The next move for Eddy Haegel has been the talk of Diggers this week with extraordinary secrecy around his new role.
The future of BHP’s outgoing nickel boss has been the talk of Diggers this week, as Eddy Haegeltakes his final bows after rescuingNickel West from almost certain demise.
Incoming asset president Jess Farrell spent the week introducing herself to the Diggers crowd, holding meetings with other nickel bosses, reporters and sundry Kalgoorlie worthies before heading out to meet the troops at the Nickel West operations.
That left Haegel to deliver his last address to the conference proper as Nickel West boss – and field the inevitable barrage of questions about what he’s going to be doing next as he did a farewell tour of the conference floor.
And he is not saying, adding to the mystery surrounding the way his departure was announced.
While BHP and Haegel himself have been at pains to say he’s not leaving the business, announcing his departure from Nickel West, without any mention of the specific role.
Even long-term business partners haven’t been able to get so much of a hint as to his future role.
The best theory doing the rounds is that he’s been lined up to build BHP’s Jansen potash project, should the BHP board tick off on the $US5.7bn ($7.7bn) first stage of the project ahead of its annual financial report in August.
That prospect explains the extraordinary secrecy around his new role – you can’t pre-empt a board decision about whether you’re going to build a project by announcing the name of the bloke who is going to do it.
It would probably also be a neat response to niggling market doubts hanging over Jansen – who better to help BHP create a new pillar for its business than the bloke responsible for restoring some of the gloss to one of its old ones?
The only sticking point to what is otherwise, to the mind of Diggers Diary, a very neat solution to the mystery is Eddy himself, who has apparently been telling friends and colleagues he’s keen to stay in WA.
Which probably argues against the possibility he’s toddling off to build a massive potash project in Canada, leaving the mystery intact.
Green and gold?
Is there such a thing as green gold? Arguably not, given that all it does is (allegedly) store value, and isn’t actually used for anything in particular other than looking pretty and being relatively hard to find.
Fresh off building the second-biggest gold miner on the ASX, former Northern Star Resources boss Bill Beament seems to agree.
Beament is a new convert to the joys of battery minerals and green commodities, courtesy of his new vehicle Venturex (soon to be renamed Develop, assuming the company’s other shareholders agree).
“Gold’s not green – sorry but it’s not,” he said on Monday.
And he probably has a point. Even if his old colleagues eventually get their gold mines to be net carbon zero, they still face the problem that they’re really only mining the stuff because people will pay for it, not because it’s useful.
But Diggers is the spiritual home of the kind of creative thinking that leads to phrases like “late-stage capitalism” getting bandied about in parliament, and great minds have already been at work on the problem.
What if, they say, we were to just drill out a deposit, prove up a defined resource and then – and this is the clever bit – not mine it at all, but just create crypto tokens to the theoretical in-ground value of the gold and sell those instead?
It is a spivnado of an idea.
Work out a way to include a buy now, pay later angle and you’re an instant billionaire.
There is an obvious barrier, of course, in the fact that even a coal-fired gold mine would be cleaner than the absolute cleanest possible cryptocurrency mining operation.
But leaving that aside, Diggers Diary can only imagine the collective fit of apoplexy that a presentation of the idea would give to the notorious party-poopers on the JORC Committee, who would inevitably be responsible for rewriting the rules to prevent it from ever happening.
But if some bright spark does give it crack (and they probably will, in some form), Diggers Diary has only one simple request.
Please give a nod to the junior mining sector’s glorious history, and cut to the chase and call the tokens Bre-X Crypto.
Terra firma
A shout-out to the good folks at Terra Drilling who have spent the week offering the latest crop of brash young stockbrokers at their first Diggers the opportunity to do something useful for a living.
Like the rest of the sector, Terra is struggling to find drillers offsiders, and has parked up electronic signage out the front of the forum looking for recruits and touting a $1000 bonus per swing.
That suggests they’re offering a pretty solid wage on an annualised basis, and Diggers Diary wishes them the best of luck.
More Coverage
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout