BHP says it lost $838 million in productivity in the second half of 2018 due to three unplanned outages, including a five-day shutdown caused by the November 5 derailment of a loaded iron ore train in Western Australia.
In its operational review for the half year ending December 2018, BHP cited a trio of unplanned outages for the US$600 million hit.
BHP said an unplanned acid plant outage in August at Olympic Dam in South Australia led to a 45,000-tonne volume impact. A September fire at the electro-winning plant at Spence in Chile had a 25,000-tonne impact. And the train derailment in the Pilbara had a volume impact of 4 million tonnes, the company said on Tuesday.
Despite the derailment – triggered deliberately by BHP’s control room in Perth after a fully-loaded iron ore train rolled away from its driver – BHP’s Western Australian Iron Ore (WAIO) operation handled 135 million tonnes of iron ore in the second half of 2018, up two per cent year-on-year.
WAIO’s calendar-year export figure for 2018 was 338 million tonnes, also up two per cent.
“At WAIO, increased volumes reflected record production at Jimblebar and the impact from the Mt Whaleback fire in the prior period,” the miner reported.
“This was partially offset by the impact of planned maintenance in the September 2018 quarter and a train derailment on 5 November 2018 which resulted in the suspension of rail operations for five days and a production impact of approximately 4 million tonnes.
“During the rail outage, mine stockpile levels were built and are expected to be partially drwn down in the March 2019 quarter.”
BHP chief executive Andrew Mackenzie said the company’s various divisions remained solid despite the outages.
“Production in the first half [of FY19] was broadly in line with the prior period despite planned maintenance and outages,” he said.