MANAGING director of Mineral Resources, Chris Ellison, told an investor meeting on 19 February that the $2.6 billion, 150-kilometre road, between the Onslow Iron mine and the port is not dangerous.
The road has been the site of several recent truck rollovers involving the iron ore miner’s 330-tonne road trains.
MinRes chief financial officer Mark Wilson said the truck rollovers involved some degree of operator error.
Mr Ellison blamed weather events for significant damage to the haul road which MinRes is spending $230 million to fix by repairing and resurfacing the length of the road with asphalt.”
It also suffered damage from cyclone Zelia.
“We had no cyclones last year and this year as luck would have it when we first opened the project, we’ve had five – how lucky can you get,” Mr Ellison said.
“Collectively we’ve had water across the road that is probably the worst the region’s had in over 40 years.”
He said weather events had pushed the mine back about six months from where they wanted to be but would only lose around three million tonnes of production.
Road repairs are expected to be completed by September but won’t prevent haulage although it will delay moves to a fully autonomous fleet using the road by about three months.
Road trains had completed more than 18,000 trips to the port in the past six months.
While it had been a tough six months Mr Ellison was optimistic about the next six. The overall picture for MinRes in its half-year results was one of an $807 million loss.
He told the meeting that Onslow was performing well with its transhippers capable of handling seven million tonnes per transhipper, and there was plenty of capacity on the haul road.
The world-first transhippers were operating above expectations and had loaded 26 ships in the six months.
However the mine had lost eight days of loading in January and another seven in February because of cyclone threats.
