Rio Tinto’s Australia Pacific bauxite operations achieved a major milestone during the most recent cyclone season: no “stack outs” and no ship diversions at the Port of Weipa.
Anyone that knows this port, located on the far north coast of Queensland in a highly weather-exposed part of the Western Cape Peninsula (where the Andoom, East Weipa and Amrun mines are located), knows the significance of this achievement.
It is no coincidence that Rio Tinto’s Australia Pacific bauxite operations accomplished this feat at the same time as its flagship mine, Amrun, exceeded its design capacity of 22.8 Mt/y for the first time since operations began in 2018, achieving 23.3 Mt in 2024 as a number of monthly and then quarterly records were broken.
A big contributor to this is the ongoing refinement and optimisation of programs devised by the remotely managed Operations Centre (OC) in Brisbane.
This facility, similar to some 80% of Rio Tinto’s operations, is being shaped by the Safe Production System (SPS) – a production system based on the philosophy that great teams bringing their best every day will safely and sustainably realise the full value of the company’s assets. Rio Tinto explains: “It (SPS) guides us on how we look after our people and our assets, how we prioritise and improve, and how we solve problems so they don’t reoccur.”
Continuous operation
Vanessa Thorley, Manager of the OC in Brisbane, says the SPS focus played a role in achieving both bauxite milestones.
“Amrun is one of the most exposed ports,” she told IM on a visit to the OC last month. “That part of Queensland suffers from both cyclones and swell conditions on a seasonal basis, which often impacts our ability to ship product from there. Up until the most recent cyclone season, we had never been able to navigate a whole year without shutting down production due to a stockpile stack-out or the need to divert ships to the less-exposed Weipa port.”
The port operation, which can hold six days’ worth of material in stockpile and sets out a six-week stockpile forecast, is one of two that Rio Tinto owns on the Western Cape Peninsula – Weipa being the other.
“The Port 365 Kaizen within the SPS was devised to maximise operational hours and port efficiency during the wet season months at the Amrun port,” Thorley explained.
It achieved all three aims this year.
Some specific actions within this project included putting more ships on the water to ensure operational flexibility, and more accurately timing ship loading operations based on both historical loading times of that vessel and expected weather events.
This is where the OC’s Dynamic Scheduling and Weipa’s Marine teams pooled their expertise to refine the process. When it comes to ship loading times, these teams ensured ships were directed to wharfs based on the time window available for loading and the average loading time of that ship – or similar ships – in the past.
Such finetuning has become part and parcel of these teams’ daily work.
Amrun acceleration
For Amrun, the combined introduction of SPS and the Asset Management (AM) Uplift programs, plus an intense focus from the OC on producing a stable plant feed, drove the performance.
The Amrun team concentrated on key SPS practices, including Kaizen which led to significant materials handling and rate improvements, and the AM team focused on optimising shutdown strategy and improving maintenance practices. The Asset Health (AH) team, meanwhile, continued to refine the real-time monitoring function in the OC. The AM team focused on the planning, engineering and maintenance functions, collaborating closely with AH.
One area of focus for the AH team has been prolonging the life of tyres in a mobile equipment fleet that, across all three operations, totals more than 90 units. Leveraging Rimex’s TyreSense solution – a temperature and pressure monitoring system – the AH team situated at the OC has been able to advise operators of potential overheating of tyres and pressure events. Considering some of the CAT 789 trucks (modified to take trailers) have haul cycles of up to one-and-a-half hours at this operation, a tyre blowout would be significant.
Reducing the interaction between heavy and light vehicles during scheduled maintenance has been another focus area for the AH team – improving safety as well as streamlining the arrival and departure of vehicles in the workshop.
Kaizen (problem solving) best practice events generated ideas to improve plant flow by 6%, and to eliminate shutdown losses entirely since March 2024. They also have the potential to improve port capacity by 10% by focusing on vessel turnaround time, according to Rio Tinto.
On the plant flow improvement, Thorley says a shift to producing one product – as opposed to three – allowed the company to increase utilisation of the wet crushing and screening plant at Amrun, by removing grade change losses, increasing feed rate and increasing stockpile capacity.
Integrated thinking
The OC, opened in 2019, runs across four shifts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Team members in the OC remotely manage dispatch, monitoring and control capabilities for both the Weipa (including Amrun and Andoom) and Gove bauxite mines, located more than 2,500 km away.
With the inclusion of both operations, the centre operates a fully integrated bauxite mine dispatch, leading to safer operations in the pit, increased pit productivity and a new opportunity to share best practice across the mines. The centre also includes utilities, stockyard, port scheduling for both export sales and internal refinery deliveries, and asset health for the Weipa Operations. Gove’s asset health, dynamic scheduling, stockyards and ports functions joined the centre in 2020.
In 2021, all these operations moved into new premises on Charlotte Street in downtown Brisbane.
A move to a modern cloud platform, plus incorporation of a back-up communications solution from Motorola Solutions, has ensured the operation is able to collect near real-time information from each of its three mines in one virtual location, enabling a complete view across the entire supply chain.
Not only is the team connected to their colleagues in Weipa and Gove, it has round-the-clock connectivity to the commercial team in Singapore. The space also features virtual desktops, two-way radios and interactive screens forming a customised “live-feed wall” to display Power BI real-time performance data and targets, RTVis mine mapping and weather alerts.
All of this has been designed to enable real-time collaboration, communication and connectivity, Rio Tinto says.
Just two years ago, the OC added the Smelter Team to the floor, furthering that integration piece.
“This team is doing some very technical work when it comes to troubleshooting reduction line operations,” Thorley explained of the Smelter Team. “We have 1,800 of these reduction cells being monitored. Should one of them experience an issue, the team in the OC are able to go through a five-loop process when they detect issues that ensures the operations team at site address these concerns before any cells go down.”
Just getting started
Thorley is incredibly proud of what her team have achieved to this point, but she is able to list off several incremental improvement projects that are either about to begin or are close to fruition.
Having broke records on numerous occasions in 2024, the Amrun team have been tasked with consistently achieving a run rate of 6,000 t/h, over and above the nameplate 5,600 t/h.
At Gove, there has been a focus on how to best leverage its “sweetener” characteristics across the wider Australia Pacific bauxite operations. “We have to be more selective over what we mine, how we mine it, and the ratios that go into the overall product feed,” Thorley says. “Every refinery is tuned to receive a certain blend, and we need to ensure that we reflect that in our deliveries.”
This is where closer collaboration with the Smelter Team in the OC, plus the potential introduction of a Refinery team, will help streamline that supply chain decision making.
Optimising the dry scrubbing process – tied to the moisture content of its products – is another area of development, Thorley explained.
And introducing an Energy team is also on the cards, with Rio Tinto realising the changing mix of diesel and renewables at the mines, refineries and smelters requires a new approach.
The project, named Kangwinan at the request of Traditional Owners, the Wik Waya people, will involve building a new mine and expanding the existing port to almost double bauxite production from Rio Tinto’s Weipa Southern operations, where Amrun is located.
Production from the Kangwinan project would replace output from Andoom and the Gove mine in the Northern Territory, which are both expected to close toward the end of the current decade.
More broadly at the OC, Thorley and the Australia Pacific bauxite operations are focusing on upskilling existing staff to work across multiple teams and sites, plus ensuring more Brisbane-based operators regularly go to site and more site-based staff visit the OC.
“We have found that the day-to-day interactions between the OC and site improve substantially after both sets of personnel gain a broader understanding of what each side experiences,” Thorley said. “These types of exchanges are the only way to increase transparency and improve communication across our operations.”