The Sino iron project geologically lies near the George Palmer deposit, which is situated within the Hamerseley basin.

The Hamersley Basin, located in the Pilbara Block in northwestern Western Australia, is about 500 km long and 250 km wide, with a west-north westerly elongation. The basin is defined by the extent of the Hamersley Group sedimentary and volcanic rocks and contains extensive banded iron formations (BIFs) and large hematite-goethite iron deposits, which occur with the BIF units.

Archean (42800 Ma) granite-greenstone outcrops over most of the northern half of the Pilbara Block and is unconformably overlain by the Hamersley Basin in the southern half of the block except for a few exposures in inliers or domes within the basin.

The Hamersley Group conformably overlies the Fortescue Group and is conformably overlain by the Turee Creek Group. It is approximately 2.5 km thick and consists of four important iron formations separated by sequences of dolomites, shales and volcanics.

The Sino Iron mine pit is over 2.6 square kilometres in area and will triple in size over the life of the project. The Company extracts the magnetite ore using traditional open pit mining techniques – drill and blast, then uses excavators to load the ore onto our haul trucks, which take the rock to four in-pit crushers.

The Company uses diesel electric MT6300 haul trucks for carting the iron ore from the pit to the crushers – this is an off-road truck engineered for high-production mining and heavy-duty construction environments.

At nearly 10 metres long and eight metres high, these trucks weigh 270 tonnes when empty and have 3,750 horsepower - each truck can haul around 360 tonnes at a time.

The Company has two types of drills at Sino Iron, the SKF15 and the Pit Viper 351.

The SKF fleet are ‘down-the-hole’, or ‘DTH’ drills, which means they have a hammer on the bottom of the drill that’s used to slowly smash through the rock until the desired hole depth is reached.

The PV351s are rotary drills – they use up to 120,000 pounds of pull-down force while the drill bit rotates, the downward pressure slowly chipping away the rock.

The PCF consists of four in-pit crushers, each standing seven stories high and able to crush more than 4,000 tonnes of ore an hour – these are the largest in-pit crushers in Australia.

The crushers deposit the ore onto one of two overland conveyors, each 1.7 kilometres in length, which transports the ore up to the coarse ore stockpile at the Processing Plant.

Every 24 hours, around 180,000 tonnes of ore are fed into the six milling lines’ autogenous grinding mills (AG mills), these are the largest grinding mills in the world. Each mill measures about 12 metres in diameter and has an internal volume of 1,220 cubic metres. As the AG mill turns, the ore crushes against itself and breaks apart.

From the AG mills, the ore travels to the primary magnetic separators where the iron is drawn away from the waste material before it’s screened and fed into the ball mills.

The ball mills are also the largest of their type – they have an internal volume of around 650 cubic metres and inside them are 800 tonnes of steel balls. This is how the ore is further pulverised until it’s a fine powder and from here it’s put through the secondary magnetic separators and de-sliming elutriation columns.

- Four in-pit crushers from Germany – the largest installation in Australia, with capacity to crush more than 4,000 tonnes of ore per hour per unit;
- The conveyor carrying crushed ore from the mine to the concentrator area is 2.4 metres wide and 1.7 kilometres long;
- Sino Iron uses largest AG mills in the world, they’re 12.2 metres in diameter and 11 metres long with 28MW gearless motors;
- The ball mills, the second stage grinding equipment, are 7.9m in diameter and 13.6m long, each with two 7800 kW motors.

Sino Iron’s Processing Plant is where the Company transforms the magnetite ore into high-quality, premium magnetite concentrate.

During the milling and separating process, the ore is mixed with water – to be efficiently pumped to the port area and prepared for export, the concentrate is thickened into a slurry form before it makes the 30-kilometre journey to the Dewatering Station at Cape Preston. Here, excess water is removed and the final product is stockpiled, ready for loading and shipping.

Water is recycled and returned to the concentrator area circuit, while waste is sent to Sino Iron's massive tailings storage facility.

- 52 magnetic separators are used in each of the processing lines;
- Two concentrate thickeners, each 45 metres in diameter and four tails thickeners each 90 metres in diameter;
- Four dewatering buildings, each containing seven press filters;
- Each press filter has a design capacity of 154 tonnes of concentrate per hour.