Australian Water Management Review Vol. 1 2014 | Page 141

IDE TECHNOLOGIES
YOUR WATER PARTNERS
The Sino Iron project – located at Cape
Preston, 100 kilometers southwest of
Karratha in Western Australia’s Pilbara
region – will be Australia’s largest
magnetite mining and processing
operation. When fully operational, the site
will mine approximately 140 million tons
of magnetite-bearing ore annually, as well
as crush, grind, separate, concentrate
and filter approximately 80 tons of
magnetite ore. As these processes require
significant quantities of fresh water not
available from natural resources at the
site, a 140,000 m 3 /day desalination plant
is incorporated as part of the dedicated
infrastructure serving the project. After
a competitive tender process open only
to companies with real capabilities
and proof of previous success, IDE
Technologies, with its reputation as
one of the world’s foremost and most
experienced desalination companies,
was contracted for the process design,
engineering and procurement of the plant,
with construction support services also
included in its scope of supply.
This plant is the first large desalination plant for a
resources project in Western Australia, and provides
a sustainable alternative to long-term ground water
use for processing the magnetite. Notwithstanding its
size and complexity, the Sino Iron desalination plant
is designed to be one of the most electrically and
chemically efficient plants in Australia, complying
with strict Australian environmental standards.
In a world first for a plant of this type (SWRO
desalination) and size, the plant was designed,
manufactured and assembled in a modular manner,
with most of the construction being performed in
China, where the huge modules were fabricated,
assembled and tested prior to shipment to the site.
The plant comprised 60 modules of varying sizes
that made their way from China to Australia by sea,
on barges, due to the difficult land access to the site.
The modular method of construction helped meet the
tight timeline that the project required, and alleviated
many of the challenges related to fabrication on site,
particularly in such a remote site.
In addition to the difficulties caused by site
remoteness and difficulty of access, the process and
engineering teams faced several other significant
challenges when designing the plant. These included
particularly tough water conditions with high levels of
Total Suspended Solids (TSS), reaching an average

of 23 ppm, and high levels of organic contaminants
from the surrounding marsh areas. Tides and
currents posed another challenge, with substantial
daily tide differentials, periodic king tides, and
conflicting currents that reverse the temperatures
and characteristics of the feed seawater bi-annually.
Copious numbers of jellyfish pose an additional
problem in the midsummer months, requiring special
first filter systems with huge vertical screens and
mechanical “fingers”.
The plant uses Reverse Osmosis (RO) technology to
meet the large-scale water production required. As
pretreatment is of crucial importance in RO plants to
prevent damage to the membranes, the challenging
water conditions in Cape Preston necessitated
a particularly robust pretreatment system that
includes both Lamella clarifiers and a DAFF system.
Multimedia gravity filters with a gravity backwash
system provide energy efficient pretreatment. The
RO section of the plant is divided into two separate
plants (2 x 70,000 m3/day), each with two RO trains
(2 x 35,000 m3/day). The trains are configured as two
separate pressure centers (IDE proprietary design),
redundant to one another. This provides a flexible
operating system capable of operating at a capacity of
66% to 100%, with optimized Specific Energy.

A project as large and complex as Sino Iron requires
work in partnership. Citic Pacific plant managers
and IDE commissioning engineers, together with the
local UGL construction team and Hatch Consultants,
collaborated successfully to bring the plant to full
operation. Since its successful commissioning and
acceptance testing, the plant has been operating
efficiently, meeting all requirements for water quality
and quantity.
IDE is proud to have been a partner in this exciting
project, which recently made its first shipment of
magnetite concentrate from the Sino Iron project in
the Pilbara to China.

IDE continued to support the customer through
the construction of the plant and successful
commissioning, covering tens of thousands of
kilometers in site visits. The first half of the plant was
commissioned in April 2013, with the second half
scheduled for commissioning in 2015, when the mine
will require the full capacity of water.
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