Mineral sands major Iluka has awarded Worley a contract to provide engineering, procurement and construction management (EPCM) services for Iluka’s Balranald Critical Minerals project in New South Wales, Australia.
The project will extract and process mineral sands – primarily the titanium mineral rutile but also zircon and rare earths – for producing high grade, high quality critical mineral products in Australia. The project will be developed using Iluka’s innovative, remotely operated, underground mining technology which enables access to ore bodies previously considered uneconomic, with lower environmental disturbance and lower carbon intensity relative to traditional extraction techniques.
Worley teams in Australia with support from Global Integrated Delivery (GID) teams in India, will work closely together to develop the design and manage the construction of the process plant and associated infrastructure.
“Worley has over 50 years of experience designing and executing mining projects and we look forward to working with Iluka to deliver the project safely and sustainably to meet Iluka’s development goals and work towards our purpose of delivering a more sustainable world,” said Chris Ashton, Chief Executive Officer of Worley.
Balranald is a rutile-rich critical minerals development located in the Riverina district of south western New South Wales. Owing to its relative depth, Iluka is developing Balranald via a novel, internally developed, remotely operated underground mining technology. Iluka’s Board approved the final investment decision for Balranald in February 2023. Site works commenced during Q3 2023 in accordance with the execution plan.
The novel mining process sequence is as follows: directional drilling/casing of access holes through the overburden to the ore zone; horizontal borehole drilling with drill strings advanced along the decline and into the orebody; high pressure water used to fluidise the ore; eductor pumping of slurried ore to the surface, which creates stopes within the orebody.
Then a process plant, being managed now by Worley, will be used to screen and separate fines and oversize material, and is expected to include a trommel, thickener and spiral plant. There is temporary stockpiling of the mineral ore for metallurgical and geochemical test work and reinjection of the separated coarse material and fines as a hydraulic backfill (mixed slurry) into the mined-out stopes. The backfill material contains a mixture of sand and slimes once the Heavy Mineral (HM) has been removed.
