Sino Iron operates out of Cape Preston, 100 kilometres south west of Karratha in Western Australia's resource-rich Pilbara region. It’s the largest magnetite mining and processing operation in Australia, where a high grade, premium iron ore concentrate is produced for export.
It's a fully integrated mining, processing and export operation. Using traditional open pit mining techniques, we excavate the ore and put it through a series of crushers and mills, water is added to create a slurry, along the way removing the valuable concentrate through magnetic separation - a process known as 'benefication'.
The final high grade concentrate is sent to port via a 30km pipeline where it's dewatered, prepared for shipping and loaded onto either barges or the Transhipment Shuttle Self-unloading Vessel (TSV), which then load the product onto arger, ocean-going vessels offshore.
Sino Iron has 3,000 direct employees and contractors. In 2017, an analysis by Deloitte Access Economics found the total export earnings of Sino Iron would exceed $100 billion over the life of the project, with a further $51 billion spent in WA on procurement of goods and services. It also showed that the WA Government would receive more than $5 billion in royalties over the same period.