LIFE is full of unexplained mysteries, but none rival the strange case of the Beenup dredge.
As a story, it’s not quite in the same category as a Sherlock Holmes thriller. The Hound of the Baskerville’ is a better read than the life and times of a titanium minerals dredge on the south coast of Western Australia.
But, for true followers of the mining industry, Beenup takes some beating.
For newcomers to the saga of Beenup, Dryblower provides a potted history. The rich ilmenite and zircon deposit was discovered by BHP about 40km east of Augusta sometime in the 1980s. It was developed in the 90s at a cost of $290 million, including construction of the world’s biggest dredge, which could cut a path through the deposit to a depth of 40m.
In theory it looked great. Then the problems started. The rock was harder than planned (stripping teeth off the cutting buckets). More clay was found among the titanium minerals than planned. And finally the tailings proved to be very fine and too rich in pyrites, which turns into sulphuric acid when exposed to air.
The upshot was BHP tried every imaginable repair job before spitting the dummy, closing Beenup and wearing the environmental clean-up cost.
But the mystery of Beenup really starts with the sale of the dredge and other equipment for the un-princely sum of $10.5 million to Kenmare Resources, which plans to use the gear at the Moma Mineral Sands Project in Mozambique.
Now Dryblower is not an accountant, but $10.5 million as a return on a $290 million outlay does not look too flash, a point not lost on critics of the deal who are convinced that selling the dredge, wet concentrator plant, minerals separation plant and other bits and pieces to a miner in Mozambique did more than raise a bit of petty cash.
The sale got the dredge off the site and far from view. It left BHP with a clean slate and an easier clean-up job – something it had to do under its mining agreement.
The sale also made it absolutely certain that nobody else could buy the project as a going concern, taking over BHP’s environmental clean-up obligations, and having a fresh go at mining Beenup.
One theory put to Dryblower is that the real problem with the pyrites lay in the depth at which the dredge cut the sands. The orebody’s richest pyrites lies in the bottom 4m of the sands. A new owner, working off a lower capital cost base, might have been able to make a commercial success of Beenup by just cutting the top layers of ilmenite.
That, of course, is all theory. The facts are the dredge has gone. Beenup is being rehabilitated and no-one will ever know whether a new owner could have done it better.
All this suits BHP as it quietly forgets its adventure in titanium minerals – but it begs the question of what might have been had the dredge stayed on site and a new, lower-cost owner had a go at running the Beenup dredge.
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