Grains of valuable heavy minerals were deposited on ancient shorelines thousands of years ago, where the action of waves and wind formed 'belts' of minerals called strand lines.
Today, Tiwest produces more than 700,000 tonnes of heavy mineral concentrate a year from strand lines using a dredging operation and dry mining techniques.
The dredging operation uses two large floating dredges in a purpose-built pond to pump slurried ore to a floating concentrator which recovers heavy minerals from the sand and clay using a series of gravity spirals.
The dry mine uses earthmoving equipment to extract ore located above the water table, feeding it to a land-based concentrator for separation using a hopper and conveyor system.
As the orebody is mined, overburden and sands with little mineral content are returned to fill the void, clay residue is pumped to solar drying cells and the surface is contoured to resemble the original landscape, prior to respreading topsoil and seeding for rehabilitation.
The heavy mineral concentrate produced at Cooljarloo is transported south in side tipping triple trailer road trains to Tiwest's Chandala Processing Plant for separation and processing.
