Wodgina

Location

Wodgina is located 1,525km north of Perth on the Traditional Owner land of the Kariyarra People. The closest major towns are Port Hedland, Marble Bar and Karratha.

Overview

As one of the world’s largest known hard rock lithium deposits, Wodgina forms part of an unincorporated joint venture between MinRes (50%) and leading battery chemicals producer Albemarle Corporation (50%).

MinRes manages all operations at Wodgina, from exploration through to mining and processing. The major infrastructure on site includes:

• open pit mine, waste dumps, Run of Mine (ROM) pad and tailings storage facilities
• crushing and processing plant via flotation concentrator
• workshops, offices, gas fired power generation and bore fields
• FIFO camp accommodation that can house up to 900 people.

Mining

Production has been by open pit methods using the conventional drill, blast, load and haul mining cycle. The host rock geology is predominantly formed from metamorphic komatiite, ultramafic and mafic rocks, and meta sediments. These are heavily weathered in the upper 20-50 metres of the pit profile and transition to hard and competent rock below that.

Wodgina has significant open-pit reserves with future opportunities to mine ore at depth via underground mining methods which are being assessed.

Mined ore is stockpiled on a ROM pad prior to crushing and waste rock is delivered to a waste rock dump.

Processing

The Wodgina crushing plant is operated by CSI Mining Services, a subsidiary of MinRes. The crushed ore is then blended and conveyed into three processing trains with a total annual production capacity of approximately 820,000 tonnes of spodumene concentrate at a grade of 5.5% Li2O.

Each processing train consists of a ball mill, deslime cyclones, magnetic separation, flotation and then concentrate and tailings dewatering. The fine tailings are pumped to a wet tailings storage facility while the coarse tailings are blended with waste rock.

Spodumene concentrate produced at Wodgina is transported by road to Port Hedland for export to global markets.