29 June 2015
Meckering operation
The Meckering beneficiation plant will be located adjacent to the ROM stockpile (refer Figure 3) and will consist of a wet processing plant to remove oversized silica. The ROM material will be
screened to less than 500 micron (<500µm) :) and beneficiated to 27-30% Al2O3. The >500µm reject material will consist primarily of quartz and silica and will be returned to the open pit.
A four-stage wet screening circuit has been designed and will comprise of drum scrubber, screening and pressure filter and dryer. The <500µm dry kaolin product will be delivered to a bagging station where the filter cake will be bagged into two-tonne (2t) “bulka bags”, which will be containerised and transported by road to the port of Fremantle, Western Australia for shipping to the Company’s HPA plant in Malaysia.
Beneficiation operations will be conducted on a continuous basis, 5 days per week on a single 12 hours shift, with weekend for scheduled maintenance. Production of
beneficiated kaolin will be at a rate of ~18,565tpa (dry)
, with ~20,300tpa (wet) of oversized quartz and silica sand tailings returned to the open pit; a beneficiated kaolin yield of ~48.5%.
The estimated cost of shipping (Meckering to Tanjung Langsat) is US$148.91 (A$165.46) per tonne of beneficiated kaolin, or US$0.69 (A$0.77) per kg of finished product HPA.
23 October 2017
Meckering operation
The proposed mining schedule at Meckering is based on a kaolin ore delivery rate of
~43,500tpa to the Company’s
Malaysian HPA plant for a target production rate of 4,500tpa.
The container loading facility will be adjacent to the raw kaolin ROM stockpile which will be located to the south of
the mining operation. The loading shed will also include office space, a crib room and toilet facilities. Raw kaolin will
be reclaimed from the ROM stockpile by means of a front-end loader and transferred to a trommel screen to
reject
material over a 12mm trommel, undersize material will be conveyed by the same mobile unit to the loading shed to an extendible conveyor unit that can extends the full 20-ft length of a shipping container and retracts during loading
to ensure even distribution of kaolin over the length of the container.
The container loading facility will be a two-man operation, planned to operate at 2,210 h/y, based on a 5 d/w at 12-hour per shift and 96% capacity utilisation. Approximately
36 containers , each with capacity of around 22t of kaolin will be loaded and transported
per week.
