Last year, Maelgwyn Mineral Services Ltd (MMS) announced that it had been awarded a contract to supply the flotation process equipment for the Beyondie Sulphate of Potash Project (BSOPP) purification plant in Western Australia. The project is being developed by ASX-listed Kalium Lakes Ltd which recently stated on June 25 that German engineer and equipment supplier Ebtec GbR has commenced the shipment of specialised equipment for Beyondie, with this first June shipment including the MMS flotation cells plus agitators and cyclones. Ebtec GbR is a JV of Germany’s K-UTEC AG Salt Technologies and Ebner GmbH & Co KG. MMS delivered the flotation plant equipment to Ebtec for onward shipment to Kalium Lakes.
This was the first of a total of 10 planned shipments, with the last shipment planned to leave Germany by the end of October 2020. The July shipment was due to include conveyor packages, centrifuges, a fluid bed dryer and pumps. Beyond that other equipment to be shipped includes a cooling crystalliser package, feeder, hammer mill, tanks and piping as well as thickeners, tanks, piping and instrumentation.
Kalium Lakes’ Managing Director, Brett Hazelden, commented: “There are only a handful of similar brine-based SOP mines operating across the world and as a result access to specific equipment design, supply, construction and the necessary operating expertise is limited. Through the partnership with our German engineering and equipment supply consortium Ebtec, which has completed similar services for a successful SOP plant in Austria, Kalium Lakes is uniquely positioned in the Australian SOP development space.”
Whilst MMS has supplied many potash flotation plants in Europe, particularly in Belarus, this will its first supply outside the continent and its largest flotation plant in Australia. MMS worked with German process engineering experts K-UTEC AG Salt Technologies to be awarded the contract. It demonstrated the superior flotation performance of Imhoflot over other flotation cells by nominally increasing the predicted overall potassium recovery from 72% to 91% in the final process design. MMS’s contract covers the supply of the conditioning vessels and Imhoflot Hybrid IMF H40 flotation cells, including all piping and instrumentation. The Beyondie project will initially produce 90,000 t/y of SOP but Kalium Lakes will twin the process plant to incrementally phase the project to ramp up to 180,000 t/y of SOP production.
The mining tenure is spread over approximately 240,000 ha and is located approximately 160km from the iron ore producing town of Newman and 200 km north of the base metals and gold mining areas of Wiluna. The project is expected to deliver a premium suite of granular and soluble products containing more than 51% K2O and less than 0.5% chloride. Commissioning of the BSOPP purification plant is expected in 2021.
