Login

The Overall Concept  (Posted on 19th June 2009)

• To establish first stage iron and steel smelting parks
  • near Newman Fortescue River Valley in Western Australia (WA) and at Abbot Point Precinct in Queensland (QLD) (near Bowen, N-Qld).
  • linked by a new heavy gauge railway line
    • over 3,300 kilometres
    • West to East
    • from Port Hedland (spur to Dampier) in WA to Abbot Point in QLD
    • linking Australia's export iron ore - coking/thermal coal mines
  • will also utilise both the sustainable and abundant natural gases available
    • coal seam methane gas in Queensland
    • natural gas in Western Australia

• International and domestic iron and steel producers are invited
  • to form and lead a steelmakers' equal share holding partnership consortium
  • with partners from China, India, Japan, South Korea, East Asia, USA and EU
  • steelmakers will design, build and construct their first-stage slab steel plants within these rail connected precincts
    • the precincts will exist within the stable political environment of Australia. 
  • Australia is the world's leading export steelmaking commodity resource economy
    • provides long-term sustainable supply,
    • containing approximately 40% of the world's seaborne iron ores
    • around 60% of the world's seaborne quality coking coals  
  • Australia offers a skilled workforce
    • In addition, we expect to arrange a scheme for five year project working visas, based on a 50% international participating relocated workforce!

• First Stage iron making products (slabs billets or blooms will be produced as feeder stock iron products) are a three times consolidation of value added iron/steel feed stock products.
  • Therefore three times smaller ships from Australia to the overseas steel rolling mills
  • This will provide processing at competitive sustainable long-term mass market locations
  • This will greatly benefit the mutual exporting and importing steelmaking nations' sustainable management of the competitive steel integrated businesses
  • The project will deliver massive business efficiencies of scale seldom offered or seen
  • There is also the bonus delivery of environmental net gains, relative to the current seaborne supply chain of Australian iron and steel making ores

• This project concept is designed to generate significant positive global scale reductions of climate change sinks ("carbon credits") by dramatically improving the current supply chain bulk handling inefficiencies. The full extent of the gain has yet to be fully quantified in the Pre-Feasibility Study

Steelmakers will:

• Build new blast furnaces in the smelter parks
• Build, own and independantly control and operate the blast furnaces

East West Line Parks will:

• Build, own and operate the rail link and the smelter park precincts
• Provide logistics and other services to the smelters

Common user industrial support infrastructure (stock & slab yards, coke ovens, co-gen power station, sinter plant, oxygen plant, etc) is to be owned/operated on a collaborative basis to maximise precinct advantage economics.