Mining billionaire Andrew Forrest stakes claim close to his heart and Pilbara home
The Forrests’ private mining company has applied for exploration licences on land covered by cattle stations that are part of the family’s vast business empire.
Billionaire Andrew Forrest has swooped on mining tenements covering part of his beloved Minderoo cattle station in the hours after they were dropped by a German chemicals company which had been eyeing the coastal land for salt production.
The Forrest family’s private mining company, Wyloo, pegged the ground and lodged two exploration licence applications with authorities in Western Australia as soon as it was up for grabs.
It is understood the Wyloo land grab could continue as other tenements that were earmarked for a salt project covering almost 21,000 hectares become available.
German company K+S walked away from its Ashburton Salt project in June, withdrawing plans and approval applications it had worked on for nearly a decade.
Kerry Stokes-backed BCI Minerals is building the $1.4bn Mardie salt and potash project on the coast north of where Wyloo has applied for the exploration licences.
The Wyloo exploration licence applications cover parts of the Urala and Minderoo cattle stations owned and run by another company owned by Andrew and Nicola Forrest, Harvest Road.
The two stations form part of what Harvest Road refers to as the 760,000-hectare Minderoo Aggregation that also includes Uaroo and Nanutarra stations. The vast aggregation plays a key role in Harvest Road’s vertically integrated beef supply chains that includes other cattle station, a feedlot north of Perth and the Harvey Beef abattoir.
Dr Forrest, the founder and executive chairman of iron ore heavyweight Fortescue, was raised on Minderoo Station and has previously fought to keep sand mining off the family property.
Harvest Road also raised environmental and other concerns about Chris Ellison-led Mineral Resources plans to build a haul road connecting stranded iron ore deposits to port facilities at Onslow.
MinRes eventually built the 150 kilometre-long haul road as part of its $3.5bn Onslow Iron project. The road runs adjacent to Minderoo Station but does not cut through it and comes within about 2o kilometres of the Forrest family homestead sometimes used for strategic planning meetings by Fortescue.
The Australian revealed in May that Fortescue was preparing to sell three cattle stations in WA, acquired at the height of its green energy ambitions.
The Emu Creek, Ella Valla and Yalbalgo Stations cover about 300,000 hectares combined but became surplus to Fortescue requirements after it abandoned plans to use them to produce green energy through solar and wind farming.
Wyloo’s plans for the exploration ground remain unclear, but it is unlikely the Forrests would venture into salt mining.
Wyloo has focused its investments and project development on nickel, rare earths and permanent magnet manufacture, and gold under chief executive Luca Giacovazzi. Wyloo has been contacted for comment.
K+S said in mid-June that it was it abandoning the Ashburton Salt project as part of a change in “worldwide strategic direction”.
K+S Salt Australia managing director Gerrit Goedecke said in a LinkedIn post that the project was viable, but the parent company no longer saw a future in salt production outside of Europe.
“We designed a project that wasn’t just competitive, but also focused on environmental responsibility and long-term sustainability. The timeline we had in mind back then (2016)? Four or five years to get it approved,” he said.
“It turned into nine. And we still hadn’t crossed the finish line. We were close, but not quite there. It became clear that more time, more work, and more money would be needed to push it through.”
The initial plans involved a capital investment of about $850m to produce 4.7 million tonnes a year of salt through solar evaporation of seawater.
Dr Forrest scored a High Court victory in 2017 in a case known as Forrest & Forrest, where he challenged the validity of mining lease applications lodged over Minderoo Station.
In a ruling with far-reaching applications, the High Court found mining lease applications over Minderoo did not meet the requirements of the WA Mining Act because a document that needed to be submitted with the applications, a mineralisation report, was not filed at the same time but two months later.
Forrest-led Fortescue and other companies applied for multiple mining leases following the court ruling, many of which appeared to overlap their existing mining leases.
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