‘It’s a secret’: Mystery surrounds Clive Palmer’s pursuit of a building licence near the Sino Iron project

Clive Palmer’s Mineralogy wants a new permit for something “secret” on mining tenements where the billionaire’s company has repeatedly failed to pay its dues. Mineralogy last week applied for a ‘miscellaneous licence’ across a 1952-hectare area it controls about 20km south of the Sino Iron magnetite mine on WA’s north-western coast between Onslow and Karratha. The royalties Mr Palmer reaps from the Sino Iron mine run by China’s CITIC Pacific has made him one of Australia’s richest people. Yet, Mineralogy has been penalised multiple times for not spending enough to develop prospective mining land near Sino Iron. The wealthy Queenslander’s Mineralogy already holds an ‘exploration licence’ over the two tenements it recently made the miscellaneous licence application for. Based on the size mining tenements this exploration licence covers, Mineralogy needs to spend at least $70,000 annually on exploration activities like drilling or geological surveys. This is on top of paying about $6,300 of rent per year. Mineralogy in recent years has been fined multiple times by the Department of Energy, Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety for failing to meet the exploration expenditure threshold. In 2023, DEMIRS fined Mineralogy $7,920 for “non-compliance with expenditure conditions” and in 2024 that fine was hiked to $25,432 for the same offence. It also received a $630 fine for the offence back in 2019. A miscellaneous licence has no annual expenditure requirements and can either replace, or co-exist with, an exploration licence. It is not clear if Mineralogy plans to keep or replace its exploration licence. The WA Government states that a miscellaneous licence is one of the permits required for building infrastructure to facilitate mining, “such as roads and pipelines”. A Mineralogy spokesman was coy and succinct when asked what piece of infrastructure the company was planning to build, if anything. “It’s a secret,” he said this week. DEMIRS also declined to comment on Mineralogy’s plans for the land, which sits within the boundaries of Mineralogy’s dormant Balmoral South iron ore project. Mr Palmer’s proposal to develop Balmoral South was rejected in 2012 by then-state development minister Colin Barnett. This led the billionaire to spectacularly sue the WA Government years later for $30 billion in damages and sparked a bitter war of words between him and then-premier Mark McGowan. Mineralogy has rarely made applications for new mining-related licenses in WA over the past decade and adding to the intrigue is CITIC’s need to re-route the access road to Sino Iron. Buried deep in a 2023 writ, CITIC flagged that parts of the public Fortescue River Road would have to be “relocated” to accommodate new waste stockpiles for future mining operations. Mr Palmer on Wednesday, just one week after lodging the miscellaneous licence request, said he supported CITIC mine’s continuation proposal at Sino Iron after a two-year standoff. If granted, the licence would give Mineralogy the right to build a road and therefore a potential bargaining chip over CITIC amid a long-running legal war between the two Sino Iron beneficiaries — a war that is set to continue in the WA Supreme Court on Monday. Sources close to CITIC do not believe the miscellaneous licence application is related to Sino Iron’s access road, although it would not be the first time Mr Palmer has blindsided his biggest cash cow.