But Whitehaven Coal’s contentious $767 million Maules Creek project is now 68 per cent complete.

Early next year, the first of the site’s estimated 320 million tonnes of recoverable coal will be railed to market.

When that day comes, it will be a sweet victory for a company that has survived a relentless crusade to scupper the mine.

However, the company’s chairman, Mark Vaile, and chief executive officer, Paul Flynn, were in no mood this week to dwell on the past.The two men, who kept faith in the project when many others – including the market – lost theirs, were upbeat during a stakeholder tour of the site on Tuesday.

Mr Flynn said there were “no scenarios” as yet imagined where coal would not continue to be “the mainstay of global energy needs of the world” for a long time to come.

In fact, the International Energy Agency estimates that coal consumption will actually increase over the next quarter of a century.

“There’s a very, very positive future for us despite the fact that people might say (coalmining) might be an industry of yesterday,” he said.

Among the beneficiaries of the continued extraction and burning of coal will be communities 

comprising the Gunnedah Basin, according to the company.

Whitehaven Coal currently employs 655 full-time equivalent workers across its open-cut and underground operations, with 75 per cent living and working in the Gunnedah and Narrabri shires.

That number is only going to swell in the coming months as more workers are recruited in anticipation of the mine becoming operational.

“We’re very proud of the fact we are a company that has its roots in this region,” Mr Flynn said. 

“Our focus is not on fly-in, fly-out – we’re very much investing in the community.”

In 2014, that part of that investment equated to about $80 million in wages paid directly to local workers.