The deposit contains both detrital and bedded-hosted iron mineralisation.

The detrital portion of the deposit is a Brockman Iron Formation-derived detrital iron deposit overlying the bedded Dales Gorge Member of the Archean Brockman Iron Formation.

The bedded-hosted portion of the deposit contains iron mineralisation which occurs as a highphosphorus Brockman Iron deposit with a weathering overprint.

The mineralisation extends 10 km along strike in an East – West direction, up to 1 km perpendicular to strike in a South - North direction and to a maximum depth of 230 m below the current topographical surface. The hydrated and detrital domains are mostly continuous with the pod-like bedded domains and the average depth varying.

The Brockman 2 is an iron ore mine a part of Hamersley Iron Operation located in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, 60 kilometres north-west of Tom Price.

Mining Operations
All of Hamersley Iron's mines are conventional open pits using track and shovel mining method with preliminary drilling and blasting. The drill holes are filled with an explosive, most often ANFO (Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil) and then charged. The resulting blast breaks the material to a size required for digging.

The broken material is loaded for transport by face shovels, excavators or front-end loaders into haul trucks. Haul trucks at our operations are typically in the 190 tonne and 240 tonne class. Overland conveyors are used to transport partially crushed feed at sites where there are long distances between the pits and process plants.

Rail and port operations
Ore from processing facilities is railed up to 460 kilometres to the coast along a dedicated privately owned rail system. A typical train consist comprises 2 GE Dash 9 locomotives, 230 ore cars and is over 2.4 kilometres long. A single driver, supported by centralised track control, operates the train.

Once the train arrives at the port the ore cars go through the car-dumper. The ore cars are rotated and the ore flows out into bins and then is discharged onto conveyors.

The ore is stockpiled according to product type and the quality control plan. The travelling stackers create 250m long stockpiles. Rotary bucket-wheel reclaimers later reclaim the ore, which will be conveyed to the ship loader.

Vessels are loaded at the berths alongside the ore wharf. Lump ore is rescreened to remove undersize material. Reclaimed ore is conveyed along the wharf and the ore is loaded into the vessel’s holds by travelling, slewing and luffing shiploaders.

There are two existing dry crush and screen processing facilities and one existing wet desliming processing facility to which Brockman Syncline 2 – East Detrital ore could be fed. Product prediction regressions for both dry and wet processing routes are assigned to the designated domains, based on the most appropriate available metallurgical data generated from PQ-3 cores, WDC, winzes and production data.

The dry plants crush and screen the ore into dry lump and fines products.

The wet desliming plant scrubs, screens and deslimes the ore to produce washed lump and fines products. The plant was commissioned in early 2015.