Diggers & Dealers 2026: All the latest news from Day 3 of the annual mining forum in Kalgoorlie-Boulder

New WA Mines Minister Daniel Pastorelli has landed at Diggers and was given a tour of the forum by chair Jim Walker.

The former Labor staffer, and Member for Landsdale, took the reins from Secret Harbour MP Paul Papalia who quit Parliament last month.

Westgold Resources has used its appearance at Diggers this year to reveal a “capital light” expansion of its Cue processing hub that will push annual capcity from 1.4 million tonnes to 1.7mt.

It said the plan was underpinned by increasing underground mine outputs from its Big Bell and Great Fingall mines near Cue.

“There is also potential for third-party ore supply via existing ore purchase agreements and if drilling is successful, from Westgold brownfields open pit resource targets at Big Bell South and Cuddingwarra,” it said.

In a short and sharp address that lasted just over a tidy seven minutes, CEO Wayne Bramwell said today also marked the two-year anniversary of its acquisition of its Beta Hunt and Higginsville asets in the southern Goldfields.

“The next phase - I’m smashing through this - and to explain the next phase of our journey, it’s really simple. Bigger mines need bigger mills,” he said.

“We are very quietly confident about the ability to continue to grow our outputs, lower our costs, and increase our returns to shareholders.”

Bellevue Gold’s boss Darren Stralow has handed out the bouquets to Bill Beament’s Develop Global - despite booting the contractor from its namesake mine near Leinster earlier this year.

Perenti subsidiary Barminco picked up a $850 million job in May and has now been on site since the start of the month.

Operational issues plagued Bellevue for much of 2024 and 2025, with several explosive charge misfires and lower-than-expected grades among the issues.

But taking to the stage to deliver the final address for the lunchtime break, Stralow said he had been fielding plenty of questions about the contractor changeover.

“I guess the two comments I want to make on it is: look, first of all, you know, thanks to the Develop team,” he said.

“You know, they’ve been on site for years, helping us build the platform and build the mine. They’ve done a great job over time, and their performance over the last few months of the contract have been really professional and really strong.

“They set up big stockpiles and set up a really good platform to kick off with the Barminco team.

“We’re on day five now of the new contract, so I can’t give you ... it’s a long-term relationship.

“We got a four plus one year contract, so we’re expecting them to be there for a long time, and they’re a great partner to have because they’re a big company.”

Stralow said Bellevue was now a $1.9 billion gold miner with $206 million in cash and gold and only $100m of debt and five established mining areas to support consistent FY27 delivery of between 150,000 and 170,000 ounces.

“We’ve always talked about ramp up. Now we’re talking about a really steady operation,” he said.

“We’re talking about a really strong balance sheet that will continue to go in the next 12 months, and we’re finally talking about growth at the asset and beyond.”

The boss of Australia’s biggest lithium pure-play believes a recent resurgence in supply across the industry will not cause a market crash reminiscent of what occurred three years ago.

Domestic lithium producers, including PLS, Mineral Resources, Core Lithium and the Wesfarmers-SQM joint venture, have restarted mothballed mines or are expanding existing operations amid a more than tripling of the spodumene concentrate price over the past year to beyond $US2000 a tonne.

The recent restart of a mega lithium mine in China and swift ramp up of output in Australia — the world’s number one producer of the battery metal — has stoked fears of a supply glut similar to when the last lithium bubble burst.

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Australian Vanadium says it is trying to create the same business model that others have forged on the path to lithium-ion supply chains for its own batteries.

“They’re very good at long duration, so the hallmark of a vanadium flow battery is the longer the duration ... where almost other, all other technologies have the opposite correlation,” said boss Graham Arvidson.

“And so then you’re probably going to ask me, well, why aren’t these being adopted more quickly?

“I think there’s a very simple answer that the market hasn’t quite been there, and we’ve been surprised that people are actually not selecting superior life cycle economics; they’re selecting sticker price.”

Australian Vanadium late last month submitted a proposal for the State Government’s $150 million, 50MW/10-hour, or 500MWh, vanadium flow battery.

The company said it proposed to build, own and operate the battery, which was designed to provide long-duration energy storage and support energy security, renewable energy integration, and network resilience in the Goldfields.

Arvidson said its was inevitable that Australia would need to embrace new storage technologies to diversify the mix, adding “vanadium flow batteries are literally the only storage technology that’s fully commercialised for decades at gigawatt-hour scale, that is ready to scale up and can actually be delivered competitively domestically”.

He asked delegates to not “lose faith” in the lacklustre vanadium price “because it has a lot of reasons to go up”.

“Australian Vanadium is ready, and the flow batteries are expanding all over the world. Keep an eye on us,” he said.

Australian Vanadium is currently focused on finalising an optimised feasibility study and remaining approvals while securing offtake and funding for its mine south of Meekatharra.

It also plans to build a processing plant between Geraldton and Mullewa in the Mid West and an electrolyte plant in Perth.

Nixon is focusing heavily on the “unique” synergies of a Genesis-Vault merger.

“We’re going to be able to optimise all sources, prioritise mills, allocate capital across a deeper project pipeline, we’ll be able to use our balance sheet to accelerate the best projects and ultimately defer the lower margin ones,” he said.

“Importantly, the ambition and commitment is to retain the agility, cost discipline, and people first culture that made Genesis successful and is visible throughout the Vault business.

“If the gold price remains strong, again we can bring forward the best assets, the best opportunities.”

He pointed to a $750m cost saving on construction of a new mill by processing ore from Genesis’ Tower Hill mine through Vault’s nearby King of the Hills facility.

He added the success of the combination would be driven by the quality of its workforce, the capability of its leadership team, “and ultimately the experience of a management group that has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to integrate assets, unlock value, improve performance, and importantly, deliver on commitments”.

“So, we really look forward to delivering on that opportunity that lies ahead, and creating a significant efforts from what we believe is one of the most compelling combinations seen in the Australian gold sector for many years,” he said.

Genesis Minerals’ CEO Matthew Nixon is busy talking up the company’s $12.6 merger with Vault Minerals, announced last month

“The combined group would become a top-three Australian gold producer and a top 20 global gold miner by capitalisation,” he told delegates.

“Now global investors they want gold exposure, but they also want investable companies with strong balance sheets, long assets, growth pathways, and credible management teams.

“This merged group would offer all of that with one additional advantage: district consolidation.

“This combination gives us production scale today, but more importantly, it gives us operational flexibility for the next 10 years and beyond.

“We see this as a rare opportunity that strategic, operational, and financial logic all point in the same direction. We’re targeting completion in November this year.”

Nixon said the merged group would immediately have 600,000 to 700,000 ounces of production, “and the dominant position in what is an 85 million ounce district in Leonora to Leonora-Laverton.”

Expect a packed house for the next speaker, Matthew Nixon, CEO of Rayleigh Finlayson’s Genesis Minerals.

Pantoro Gold is targetting production of between 90,000 and 105,000 ounces this financial year and tipping “very strong” cash generation potential as the price of the precious metal holds above $US4000.

It’s a turnaround story from a few years ago when the miner was “just surviving”, according to MD Paul Cmrlec.

“We barely had a pulse.”

Pantoro Gold last month said it was taking steps to turn around its performance after revealing production at the Norseman gold project fell short of its revised guidance in the 2026 financial year.

Production came in at 77,408oz, down on the 84,536oz produced in FY25 and short of its revised FY26 guidance of 86,000oz to 92,000oz, which had been set in March from the original target of 100,000oz to 110,000oz.

Cmrlec told delegates the miner now had a balance sheet “that will allow the company to continue to power forward”.

“In the longer term, our aim is to replace all of that lower grade open pit material with high grade underground material and take our production to 200,000oz-plus,” he said.

“So it won’t happen overnight, but I believe that it will happen. Our processing plant is in a great position to do that for us.”

Cmrlec said the Norseman belt had been unloved for three decades and Pantoro was “just touching the tip of the iceberg here” in the “most prospective goldfield in Western Australia”.

“We already have a reserve that’s roughly three times bigger than it has been in its whole 100-year history, and aiming to double that again,” he said.

WA1 Resources says its Luni niobium project on the WA/Northern territory border has the potential to crack the global monopoly on supply of the highly critical mineral.

It is essential for producing high-strength, low-alloy steels, and is “irreplaceable” in modern defence, aerospace, and medical technologies, managing director Paul Savich told delegates.

He said about 73 per cent of current global supply of niobium comes from CBMM’s privately owned Araxá project in Minas Gerais in Brazil.

Luni, he said, was the highest quality undeveloped niobium deposit globally and, as a sign of its significance to the supply of critical minerals among allied nations, was awarded major project status by the Australian Government in 2025.

“There is no undeveloped niobium deposit on Earth that comes close to the scale and grade of Luni,” Savich said.

“Our pre-feasibility study is on track for release next quarter, and that data is already enabling meaningful decisions and discussions toward our ideal project partnering, delivery models, and funding.

“We’re not following a conventional stage development path.

“We’ve brought forward key permitting and approvals processes so they can inform our feasibility studies, and this enables an efficient feedback loop between these integrated work streams at the optimal time.”

Savich said the fastest growth in demand for the critical material was coming from China, which - unlike most commodities - does not have any domestic supply.

“Despite the fact that a niobium supply disruption would potentially have a greater impact than rare earth elements, and Luni is so significant that it has the potential to take niobium off the critical mineral list of many allied nations.”

In closing, he said the world does not simply need more critical mineral projects.

“It needs the few projects that can genuinely change supply chains, and Luni is one of the few projects that is capable of doing exactly that,” he said.