Tom Price Mining - Pilbara to Rio Tinto

On Tuesday, we took a mine tour of the now Rio Tinto

run Tom Price Iron Ore mining operations just southwest of town. Bob, a very knowledgeable man who lived locally in the area took us and about 20 people from an AAT tour group (they all knew each other and had name tags on) on an hour and a half drive into the mine and to the pit look out. He had incredible knowledge about the equipment and operations of the mine as well as a very entertaining sense of humour. We watched massive Komatusu 830E 240 ton dump trucks wind their way up the pit road full of rubble from a recent blast.

I get that my home, the car we are driving around this vast land in, the building in which I sit 39 stories up above the city streets and the trains I commute daily in require Iron in some form or another to exist in their current state and certainly the settling of our westernised ways would not be nearly as it is today without the mining and use of Iron in massive quantities. But to see the raw earth in that state is hard. To know that no matter what level of rehabilitation the mining companies are required to do when the mining has finished, that literally mountains will have been removed from the horizon is quite hard to swallow. The raping of the land has never been so focused for me until we stood upon the tiny pit viewing platform hundreds of meters above the drill rigs and trucks breaking up and picking up tons of earth (waste earth at that because they were merely moving earth to get the precious vein of Iron below).

Hearing the amount of diesel that a single truck used on average (up to 20 litres per km/5.2 gal/..62 mi) in the mine and then to see the vast numbers of the machines around the place just demonstrated the sheer amount of energy consumed just to extract the ore. This ore then still has to be blended with other ore to attain export quality, be moved several hundred kilometers to the port at Dampier on the far northwest coast of Australia, sail thousands of miles across the oceans to be smelted at factories in China, then distributed world wide to be made into anything and everything that has a bit of iron in it.