Photo by: Reuters
PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Iron-ore miner BC Iron has warned that sales from its Nullagine joint venture (JV) with Fortescue Metals would decline by about 500 000 t during the September quarter, as production and haulage rates are reduced.
In its quarterly report for the three months to June, BC Iron reported an expanded footprint at the Nullagine JV, with additional clays detected from new mesas. The ore with the higher clay content was classified as potentially ‘sticky’, and the company has elected to stockpile a portion of this ore for later blending or processing.
The miner has also started a number of initiatives to better anticipate and manage product quality and performance, including procedural changes to geology mark-ups and selective mining of the mesas, scheduling tighter-spaced drilling and geological analysis, changing the screens at the crushing and screening plant to produce a coarser product, and re-screening lower-grade direct shipping ore product to remove ultra-fine material.
While these initiatives were under way, BC Iron has reached an agreement with Fortescue to reduce production and haulage from the Nullagine JV, in Western Australia, to partially coincide with a planned maintenance shutdown of the reclaimer at Fortescue’s Christmas Creek rail loadout facility.
As a result, Nullagine sales for the September quarter would be three ships below expectations.
As the project was set up to operate at a sprint capacity of 6.5-million tonnes a year, it was expected that these initiatives would enable the catching up of at least two of the delayed shipments during the last three quarters of the 2015 financial year.
As a result, BC has maintained its full year 2015 sales guidance of between 5.8-million and 6.2-million tonnes of ore.