A lawyer for Pilbara Ports claims Mineral Resources’ refusal to pay port fees was ‘utterly without merit’ as parties head to the state’s highest court for the first day of their trial.
A lawyer for Pilbara Ports claims Mineral Resources’ refusal to pay port fees was ‘utterly without merit’ as parties head to the state’s highest court for the first day of their trial.
Pilbara Ports Authority sued Mineral Resources in the Supreme Court of WA in April last year, alleging the miner owed $5 million in unpaid export levies from the Port of Ashburton.
By August, the court was told the estimated alleged debt had escalated to $14 million.
Chris Ellison-founded Mineral Resources has continued to claim that the arrangement, in which Pilbara Ports collects levies on behalf of Port of Ashburton funder Chevron, was invalid.
Lawyer for the parties appeared in court on Tuesday, for a scheduled three-day trial before Supreme Court Justice Jenni Hill.
Barrister Bret Walker, representing Pilbara Ports, told the court Mineral Resources sought to resist an “extremely straightforward” statutory liability.
“We don’t know whether this will be a case if we’ll be pressed… [that] somehow the resistance in paying the channel charge is justified, or can be in part, by the fact that the use by MinRes transshipment barges is not for the whole length of the complete channel,” he said.
“We say this is utterly without any merit, has no footing in any legal analysis concerning the expression of ‘channel charge’.
“The fact of the matter is a channel charge is embed upon you using the channel. Using a part of it is still using the channel.”
Pilbara Ports took over the management of the facilities at Port of Ashburton from Chevron in 2018.
The port was developed by Chevron as part of its $3 billion Wheatstone development, which included dredging of a deep channel necessary for giant LNG ships to use Ashburton and multi-user port facilities.
Under a commercial agreement between Pilbara Ports and Chevron, operators using the Port of Ashburton are hit with an additional levy for every tonne exported.
A channel charge of 90 cents per gross register tonne and Ashburton cargo wharf charge of 50c/GRT have been effective since October 2024, according to Pilbara Ports’ documents.
MinRes launched its own action to access documents detailing the levy arrangement between Pilbara Ports and Chevron, and succeeded earlier this year.
In February, MinRes won access to executive-level paperwork at Pilbara Ports, including documents sent to the port authority’s executive committee throughout 2024.
Speaking to the court on Tuesday, MinRes’ lawyer Grant Donaldson said the state development agreement between Pilbara Ports and Chevron was a critically important document for the dispute.
“What is being put by the port authority in this action is what is referred as a ‘channel charge’,” he said.
“It is a number of things and can be all of them at the same time.”
The terms of the state agreement continue to be confidential.
However, it has been previously reported that Chevron could generate up to $945 million over the 30-year mine life of MinRes’ Onslow Iron at a proposed production rate of 35 million tonnes per annum.
In a statement, a Chevron Australia spokesperson claimed the matter was a straightforward debt recovery between Pilbara Ports and MinRes.
“Chevron Australia, on behalf of the Wheatstone joint venture, constructed the $A3 billion Port of Ashburton during development of the Wheatstone Project,” the spokesperson said outside court.
“In accordance with State Development Agreement commitments, we handed it over to the State at no cost in stages between 2017 and 2018.
“Subsequent project proponents, including Mineral Resources, have benefited from the Port of Ashburton without having to make the significant up-front capital investment required to construct it.”
The trial continues.
