From Today's West Australian for those who can't get itBCI...

From Today's West Australian for those who can't get it



BCI Minerals’ boss is ready to shake up the salt game, remains unfazed by potash failures peppered across WA


BCI Miner BCI Minerals aims to become a kitchen staple when it ships first salt from its Mardie project near Karratha in mid-2026, but not in the way many would expect.

On the surface the salt industry seems like a bland proposition and BCI’s managing director David Boshoff freely admits he had reservations before taking the gig.

“When I first started looking at the opportunity here at BCI, I’ll have to admit salt didn’t blow my hair back,” he told The West Australian.

“But I didn’t understand how much salt is part of our everyday use.

“There are so many different things you don’t even imagine that salt is part of that supply chain.”

The salt from Mardie will be entirely used for industrial chemicals in the burgeoning Southeast Asian market, Mr Boshoff explains, with those chemicals then used to create aluminium, glass, solar panels, ceramics, paints and PVCs.

“If you think about your kitchen, almost everything you can touch there in some way has been supplied by salt production,” he said.

Salt for industrial purposes is purified to remove minerals found in everyday table salt, such as magnesium.


A South African native, Mr Boshoff cut his teeth in iron ore before moving to Queensland and building a career as a coal executive, with BCI’s Mardie project representing a unique new challenge.

“Where the Mardie salt operation is different to a typical mine is that with those mines you will have a model of the mineral resource, and you’ll build your assets around that,” he said.

“In our case it’s driven by our source of seawater, so we start with the primary seawater intake then the evaporation process starts.

”BCI locked-in full project financing for the $981 million salt component of Mardie last month, with the operation forecast to produce about 5.35 million tonnes of salt a year over 60 years.

Industry analysts have forecast a circa 30 per cent increase in global salt demand by 2030, with Mexico, India, and Australia the three key producers.

Mr Boshoff is confident BCI has the competitive advantage on both a global and domestic level to capture a major slice of the projected salt demand increase. He highlights the challenges for other salt hopefuls to bring on new supply, with the need for a large parcel of flat terrain and the right weather for the evaporation process.

“You also need to think about downstream constraints — shipping constraints and port constraints — given that we will be the only producer in WA with a dedicated port for our own product, we see that as an opportunity to respond to volume (demands),” he said.

Rio Tinto’s Dampier Salt operations in the region is the world’s largest exporter of solar salt.

Mardie is also a solar salt operation, meaning salt is produced from evaporating seawater instead of being mined as a solid mineral.

“Compared to say India — many of the Indian salt operations are inland — and they’ve got challenges with contamination getting the product to the coast from an infrastructure perspective,” Mr Boshoff said.

“The distance to our customers is another key advantage, we see a lot of growth coming out of Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia we are located near.

”Salt is expected to comprise about 80 per cent of the revenue from Mardie, with a sulphate of potash (SOP) component rounding off the anticipated earnings stream.

SOP is a potassium-rich product used to make plant-based agricultural production more efficient and environmentally-friendly. The array of SOP projects across WA have been plagued by technical and development issues, with one-time industry frontrunners Salt Lake Resources and Kalium Lakes both collapsing.

To date, no potash project in Australia has reached nameplate commercial production status as the nascent industry struggles to gain a foothold domestically.

But Mr Boshoff is not deterred by the failures of his predecessors and says BCI is “very much committed” to potash.

“Our source (for SOP) is a by-product from seawater and we can control the chemistry really well, while if you are pumping that from an underground aquifer there’s more uncertainty and challenges in the chemistry,” he said.

“And of course, as the so-called late-comer to this development we have the opportunity to learn from those projects that haven’t been successful — to get the design right, get the flow right.

”BCI is aiming to progress debt funding discussions for the sulphate of potash plant next year following the completion of further design and cost development studies.

WA businessman Kerry Stokes — chair of Seven West Media, which publishes The West Australian — has a 39.5 per cent stake in BCI.