The old mine pit is currently a 350 metre deep “acid bath’’ that has occasionally breached containment and leaked into the Dee River and it has cost the State Government millions to try to solve the problem since operations closed at the site in 1990.

This time around Treasurer Cameron Dick and potentially the Federal Government’s Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility will tip an unspecified amount of taxpayers’ money into Heritage’s plans to re-process the old tailings and rehabilitate the pit.

“What we have to do is stop this acid mine drainage by reprocessing this material,’’ Heritage managing director Malcolm Patterson said.

“We are going to put it all back into the hole and we are going to eventually reform Mt Morgan, the Iron Mountain as it was called originally.

“So, there will be a mountain sitting here. It won’t be quite back to normal but it will be pretty close.

“At the moment the Government is spending millions of dollars every year just to minimise this contamination and that’s forever. There is no end to this stuff …. a thousand years (later) and it’s still producing acid.”

The project hasn’t reached financial close, so it’s not certain, but Patterson said the State Government grant would be a gamechanger and would lead, hopefully, to the NAIF funding which is expected within weeks.

Patterson said the project would deliver 60,000 ounces of gold a year.

At current prices of $US1750 an ounce that’s $US105 million ($A156 million). On top of that there is also copper and other metals in the tailings.

Dick said the potential of the project was not only the estimated 263,000 ounces of gold and 5600 tonnes of copper Heritage could salvage, but also the 133 full-time local jobs by almost $40 million in new mining royalties to the State over its first seven years of operation.

Patterson said Heritage was looking at a 50-year mine life “just treating all the waste you can see around the place”.

“We are not going to touch the ground at all, just the stuff that’s sitting on top,” he said.

“Fifty years of production really does change the picture for us. It’s going to change things so much for this town.’’

That is potentially true. Mt Morgan has a big unemployment problem and the mine is promising about 133 jobs which Patterson will have an echo through the local economy.

Rockhampton Mayor Tony Williams said it would be major step forward in “providing rivers of gold’’ for Mt Morgan and would be transformational for the community.

Heritage is aware of the scepticism after so many failures. Its plan includes the construction of a new water treatment plant to lower the level of contamination in the open cut pit, treatment of all water captured by the site’s seepage interception system, and help meet regulatory requirements for the release of treated water into the Dee River.

New technology would allow the process to reduce cyanide consumption by 50 per cent, detoxifying the mine’s tailings stream and improving clean water discharge.