Intec acquires major Australian recycling site

Archiv – Metals processing group Intec has entered a A$20 million agreement for the purchase of a fellow Australian metals processing plant in Newcastle, which will position the company as a major metals producer in Australia using the company’s Intec Process technology.Australia | Metals processing group Intec has entered a A$20 million agreement for the purchase of a fellow Australian metals processing plant in Newcastle, which will position the company as a major metals producer in Australia using the company’s Intec Process technology.
The plant features a hydrometallurgical unit suited to operating the Intec Process at full commercial scale, as well as a refractory unit to be brought quickly into operation for profitable recycling of Intec’s stockpile of Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) dust.
The hydrometallurgical unit will have the capacity to produce up to 15,000 tonnes per year of highgrade copper and lead metals, as well as 10,000 tonnes per year in valuable zinc intermediates and silver, indium and other by-products.
The plant produced electrolytic manganese dioxide (EMD) for battery use until March 2008, when it was decommissioned by its owner Delta EMD Australia, due to low EMD prices worldwide. With legal agreement in place to prevent the site ever being reused for future EMD production, Intec says ’it is perhaps better placed than any other Australian company to unlock the value of, and to utilise, this extensive plant infrastructure.’
Philip Wood, its Managing Director and CEO: ’There is more quality equipment on this site than we would have considered putting into our first commercial project, and it is contractually available to us at a fraction of the cost. So now we have every opportunity to really prove what Intec can do.’
The plant was originally constructed in 1989 (at a capital cost of over A$160 million) and operated by BHP until being transferred to Delta in 1998 and is estimated to have a replacement cost of up to A$500 million in today’s terms.
The Intec Process can profitably treat ’orphan’ or ’stranded’ intermediate feedstocks that miners would otherwise dispose to tailings, without those miners interrupting existing high-grade concentrate supply agreements to smelter customers. The coastal mainland location also improves accessibility for delivery of copper, lead, zinc, silver and other metal feedstocks, which will be treated on either a project-participant or toll-treatment basis.
Intec now enters into a near five-month due diligence period (ending 15 April 2009), which will also be used by the Company to secure the total initial capital costs for all of the site purchase, Refractory and Wastewater Units startups and working capital.