the vms tin elephant, page-13

Hi Caldazar,

This is a bit of length of string question so try and narrow down the options. Top of the line would be a direct reduced iron plant using natural gas and would cost $500+M probably a lot more. It's out of my field and I'm not sure how well Tassie's natural gas infrastructure would cope. From an environmental perspective this sort of plant is the way to go. Steel produced via direct reduction of magnetite and electric arc furnace generates much less CO2 than other routes to steel. As a bonus, electric arc furnaces recycle steel scrap. I expect that if the total resource turns out to be in the order of a billion tonnes of magnetite, then eventually, direct reduced magnetite will be produced in Tassie from Mt Lindsay ore.

At the other end of the spectrum the ore could conceivably be dug up and trucked to Savage river to be crushed in the plant there and carried to Port Latta in the slurry pipeline. Cost would be in the order of $20M + lease costs for trucks + any road upgrade costs. The tin would turn into a problem rather than an asset. As I recall, tin can be an unwanted contaminant for steel making and anyway the tin is a valuable coproduct. The $20M option is out for this reason.

For around $50M we should get mine and associated infrastructure, two stage semiautogenous grinding, magnetic separation and some froth flotation together with a gravity plant for tin recovery. This is probably the minimum amount of plant needed.

I'm neither engineer nor metallurgist but I think I have the orders of magnitude about right for these costings. Would welcome any informed feedback on the figures.