In the dark red area of this sat photo sits Bahrain Steels entire 9 million ton iron ore pellet processing plant. They import the ore from around the world and use cheap gas to convert it to pellets suitable for DRI then re-export most of it bar a few million tons that goes via conveyer belt to the SULB steel mill next door. As you can see you would easily get both it and an iron ore export stockpiles on a 1000 acres, several times over. The Flinders Port consortium building the port is obviously happy for HIO to buy all the surrounding land.... one can only guess that HIO has very very big plans to eventually utilise the port to capacity .....and the consortium is willing to build them the port on that basis.... otherwise one would think that they would otherwise be extremely reluctant to have HIO possibly block access or make profits selling it to others.
My conclusion, rightly or wrongly, is the 20Mt of Supergrade is just the start and stage 2 will incorporate a (eventually massive) pellet plant using the areas rapidly growing cheap green energy potential. For there have recently been huge breakthroughs in green hydrogen production efficiency such as
https://hysata.com/ - simple, yet brilliant, highly efficient, cost effective technology that will soon see the H2 price drop below parity with fossil fuels, allowing the likes of HIO to competitively produce the greenest DRI and EAF steel mill feedstock available worldwide. The new SA gov't is spinning its wheels to buid a hydrogen plant in the area with fists full of dollars itching to find a use for it's output. The convergence of SA's green energy potential via it's cheap windswept sunny land, the Braemars massive magnetite reserves and hard to transport green hydrogen exported as embedded energy within pellets and/or EAF feedstock will make both HIO, SA and Australia an export powerhouse via value added feedstock that will be eagerly sought after by steel mills worldwide.
