Trucking Ore

From memory BHP trucked 5 million tonnes of ore from Mining Area C (now known as MAC) into Port Hedland so that they could sell it to various steel mills (at a cheap rate) to see if their furnaces liked the stuff.
Once it was agreed that the mills did like it, they then formed JV's to build the mine etc. This was the very start of the WA mining boom and led to the initial port expansion at Port Hedland (would have been about 2003/4 from memory).

The Port Hedland Port Authority has a multi user berth at Utah Point which was built specifically for junior miners to export their ore's from. Could we gain access to the Utah Point Berths/stockpiles???

If our ore is indeed DSO (as we have been told) why don't we have a crack at trucking it in to the Port? If it is as good as we are told and as close to the surface as we are told it could be mined using strip miners, the same machines that FMG use.

The 4 trailer road trains (quads) operating in the Pilbara carry about 120 tonnes of ore overall (higher than in town) under concessional loading licences. 1 quad would probably make 3 return trips per 24 hours, 6 quads makes 2100 tonnes of ore per day, 60,000 tonnes per month. Not really a lot if you compare them to BHP and FMG however something like this might be of interest to some of the smaller mills that are out there. It would mean that our ore was in the market place and might even lead to some investment interest.

Given the IO price at the moment there wouldn't be much profit left over for us, but we would be out there.

Just a thought.


Cheers