The Blog

During the month of September, Monadelphous secured two new three-year maintenance services contracts with Rio Tinto Iron Ore’s Coastal and Inland West Operations in Western Australia worth a total of approximately $100 million.

The scope of work awarded to Monadelphous includes responsibility for any shutdown and maintenance services across various Rio Tinto Iron Ore’s Pilbara sites.

For a full list of their current projects, click here: http://www.monadelphous.com.au/OurProjects.aspx?Page=ProjectResult&View=map&Identifier=6399c35c-c087-4fa4-b951-6fd82a51c1a7

Bechtel are the appointed project management contractor for the $2.5b Efficiency and Growth Project for the BHP Billiton Worsley Alumina operation. In late 2008, they commenced the first round of recruitment which will see 4,000 jobs created over the two year life of the project, with an anticipated completion date around November 2010. Now at the halfway point and the employment peak, the project is one of the biggest industrial developments in the South West of Western Australia.

Up until now, little has been publicised about Rare Earth Elements (REEs), the commodity of choice for Arafura Resources, which is interesting in itself because:

• It has been touted as a reasonably rare commodity due to them being widely dispersed – apparently less common than iron, carbon or silicon but on a par with nickel, copper and zinc, and yet more abundant than gold, platinum or palladium;
• They are indispensable to modern technology, as there are generally no substitutes, and;

Whilst Chevron’s Gorgon project has garnered most, if not all, of the nation’s attention, many don’t realise that the contracts already signed for LNG projects in Queensland’s Surat Basin are actually more than that of Gorgon.

In fact, Queensland’s burgeoning LNG industry will offer as many as 18,000 direct and indirect jobs, including over 4,300 in the Darling Downs South West region alone. If all of Queensland’s projects materialise, they will have the potential to export in excess of 50m tonnes of LNG per annum.

So...what is LNG?