Virentia specialises in end-of-life land rehabilitation for the mining, industrial and renewables sectors. We build and manage expert consortia to acquire sites, accelerating their rehabilitation and transformation into safe green spaces or land for ready for future development.

Our approach is built on rehabilitation certainty. We work closely with communities and the government to resolve environmental liabilities through a responsible and transparent delivery model. The result: we create new jobs, restore ecosystems, and unlock economic value far sooner than the status quo.

We are committed to working with industry to provide an alternative pathway for to rehabilitate their end-of life sites with an expert team underpinned by an innovative suite of insurance products that relieves parties of current and future liabilities, whilst providing the appropriate guarantees to the government AND protects our team of partnering contractors and technical advisors.

Our collaborative process includes extensive engagement with the community, Traditional Owners and government to respect community values and the region’s economic potential. Together we will agree the outcomes of rehabilitation including final landforms, rehabilitation standards and end-use.

A Unique Opportunity
Australia faces a large and diverse rehabilitation liability that continues to grow year on year. From a Queensland mining industry perspective there are more than 15,000 abandoned mines and approximately 95 in ‘Care and Maintenance’ (unlikely to be mined again) – not one tier-one mine has ever been fully rehabilitated and the tenure returned to the government. Given Australia’s extensive mining history the statistics are equally grim across other states of Australia.

A similar story is unfolding across the nation’s aging industrial sites and first-generation renewable energy projects now reaching their end-of-life. Historically, full-scale rehabilitation has been rare, leaving an environmental and financial burden for future generations.

This legacy of inaction is ending. Growing community and government concern over these environmental liabilities is driving significant regulatory change with the mining sector leading the industry. Across all sectors, governments are enacting new legislation to ensure taxpayers are not left with the clean-up costs. This includes stricter definitions of rehabilitation requirements and a rigorous review of financial guarantees, which are expected to increase significantly.

Across Australia, Financial Assurance (FA) is a financial security typically required by state and territory governments from companies undertaking environmentally impactful activities, such as mining, polluting industry and legacy renewable energy infrastructure, that carry significant environmental rehabilitation obligations. This security, typically held as a bank guarantee, functions as an insurance policy to ensure that taxpayers are not left with the cost of remediating a site if the operator defaults on its environmental duties, with the amount calculated by the regulator to cover the full, independent cost of rehabilitation.

As a result of this mounting legislative and financial pressure, owners of end-of-life assets are seeking credible, commercial solutions. Virentia delivers exactly that: an insured, guaranteed model that permanently resolves these complex liabilities.

The Virentia Approach
Under the guidance of our advisory board, and in partnership with insurers, government and community, Virentia seeks to acquire end-of-life mine, industrial and renewable energy sites for complete rehabilitation, with the rehabilitation works funded by the asset owner and costs tendered to contractors as ‘fixed-price’ construction projects.

The Virentia approach grew from the management team’s work on the acquisition of a number of end-of-life Queensland coal mines for remnant mining and rehabilitation. The team structured and facilitated the contracts to acquire the Blair Athol coalmine in Clermont, Queensland from the Rio Tinto-led Blair Athol Coal Joint Venture for $1 and a vendor payment approximating the existing Financial Assurance (FA) amount for the mine. This acquisition was completed by Terracom in 2017. This model has also been successfully used by others to acquire other end-of-life mines such as Isaac Plains and Integra.

We saw the opportunity to acquire mine sites and use our innovative and comprehensive commercial model to turn mine rehabilitation into a profitable and socially and environmentally responsible endeavour.