Industrial Tour- Part 3

The third part of the trip was up into the central part of South Australia to see the BHP Olympic Dam mining and refining centre. This strictly doesn't count as "The Outback". The Outback is defined as anywhere north of the Dingo Fence, erected to keep the dingos out of pastoral land to the south. At our furthest north, we were still 200km short of this point.

The first part of the journey was back to Port Augusta. In addition to the power station, it also acts as something of a tranport terminus. The South-North railway starts in Adelaide, passes through Port Ausgusta and then runs north to Alice Springs and Darwin. It is known as "The 'Ghan" because in the 19th century Afghan labourers were imported to handle the transport of railway building materials. If any remained, they are now presumably completely merged into the Australian population. After construction was finished, their camels were released in the middle of the desert on the grounds that conditions were so harsh they couldn't possibly survive in the wild. In fact, of course, they survived very well and in the last century a business grew up in which wild camels in the outback were caught, broken and exported to the Middle East.

One sees articulated lorries anywhere in Australia. Once north of Port Adelaide they are allowed to add a third trailer and become "Road Trains." They are formidable units and one needs to keep an eye open on the road, for this if no other reason.

The road can be a bit hypnotic- mosly die-straight. No Romans here (as far as is known), but the Roman road-builder's motto "Straight is great. Curvy is pervy." certainly applies.

The occasional bend comes as something of a novelty.

If you look at a satellite photomosaic of Australia, you see a greener area curving north from the head of the Spencer Gulf, obviously caused by a wetter microclimate. It's not that wet- this is it after almost unprecedented rainfall. It's mostly, I understand, Mulga bush.

However, as you go north it gets drier......

And drier. This all still, by the way, counts as productive pastoral land.

There are many "lakes" shown on the map. They may well have been lakes in the geological past, but are now flat clay-pans. The apparent water seen here in the distance is mirage.

We passed through Woomera (of which more later) and headed off the main road to a settlement called Roxby Downs. It exists in its present form because of the mining works a little to the north called Olympic Dam (after an irrigation unit completed at the same time as the 1956 Olympics.) The road continues another 200km or so to an opal mining settlement called Aramooka and ends there.

Roxby is a perfect piece of Australian suburbia transplanted to the middle of the desert. The building is the shopping mall.

In the middle of so much emptiness, it's a shock to see the processing plant at Olympic Dam rearing into sight over the horizon. The main product by weight is copper, but they extract zinc, cadmium, gold, silver and uranium as well. The number of stages in the processing is staggering. Some of them are thermal- huge combustion-fired or electrical furnaces- but many are "wet" processing. Some of the countercurrent washing stages are huge- settlers 100m in diameter and 5-6 of them in series.

The staff are accommodated in a camp and we stayed there as well. It's all rather North Sea- the cabins are basically sections of containers but very well fitted out inside. There is a sleeping cabin and a shower which is about the same size, and very much needed in that climate. The working day is about 6am-8pm for the graduate staff, but compensated by frequent periods of leave long enough to go to Adelaide or other centers of more normal life. The self-service catering is North Sea as well- 24 hour, lavish, very well cooked and with facilities to make one's own packed lunch. Because of the shift system adjacent tables will have people eating breakfast and their evening meal. One difference form the North Sea is that the camp isn't dry. I suppose human nature can be pushed only so far.

All this activity, industrial and human, is a major strain on the environment. Thinking just about water, huge quantities are required- imagine the evaporative losses from all those settlers in that climate. The workforce also needs a lot of water. We were there in the depth of winter and it didn't feel hot (damn cold at night, in fact- when we arrived the younger graduates put on an outdoor barbecue. Very nice and lavish, but it was absolutely freezing) but the plant tour left everyone with a raging thirst. At the debriefing the company handed out bottled water and everyone soaked up at least a litre. At present it is taken from artesian bores, but the effect on the great water table is perceptible. This underlies all of central Australia but the renewal rate is low- the residence time for subterranean water is measured in tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. There are plans to supplement this and allow for expansion by siting a desalination plant at the head of the Spencer Gulf and piping the water to Olympic Dam. However, the locals there are up in arms about this, believing, plausibly, that the tidal scour there is so poor that the salinity of the water will be changed and affect their fishing catches.

On the way back, at my urging, we had a detour into Woomera. Anyone much under 60 probably needs an explanation. In the 1940-60s, when Britain and the Commonwealth had a missile and space programme, this was where all the testing was done. One impressive fact is that the town, workshops, airport, ranges and target area were all within the boundaries of one sheep station, Arcoona. Woomera is still used for some such purposes but the population can't be more than 10% of what it was at its height. A real ghost town. More recently it was used as a detention centre for illegal asylum-seeekers, on the more or less explicit grounds that they should be discouraged from arriving in the first place. The driver of our coach had done a lot of transport for this programme and had a rather hard view of these individuals. In his experience they were mostly well-qualified and well-off, and were furious because they had paid a lot of money to traffickers to get them into Australia, only to be among the few percent that were caught. With the fall of the Howard government and the Rudd administration, these harsh measures have been, at least in theory, dropped (they now take them to Christmas Island, which is probably no better.) Significantly, the number of boats intercepted in the Timor Sea has shot up in recent weeks.

There is a glorious static park in the middle of town with samples of the kit that had been tested locally. I hopped off and took some photographs- a bit infantile but for me definitely a step back to the time when every schoolboy was obsessed with the whole field.

We spent so much time on this that we didn't have time for our last port of call- a gas stabilisation plant at Port Bonython. It can just be seen across the gulf from Whyalla on this photograph. It was no particular loss to me- it can't be very different from Shell Mossmorran. But the students don't get too much exposure to more traditional Chemical Engineering and it was a pity they missed it.

I can't conclude this particular part of the blog without expressing my thanks to Dr David Lewis, who organised the trip this year. The job is not too popular and is assigned on a Buggins-turn basis, but might be better if one person handled it for two or three years running. There would probably have to be some substantial academic payoff for this to avoid people feeling put-upon, though.

Anyway, David did a splendid job and I'm grateful to him for allowing me and Liz on the trip. It was a slightly odd feeling when the bus drew to a halt and someone else got out and headed for the gatehouse, but it was nice to sit back and let someone else take the strain!

Industrial Tour- Part 2

In this leg of the tour we headed North from Adelaide. The first stop was hardly any distance at all, as we visited a Smiths Crisps plant in the northern outskirts of the city. Food processing plants fall into two categories: either you come out swearing that you'll never eat their products again, or not. This was the second kind, though a look at the bulk delivery of cooking oils suggests that it might be healthier to limit one's intake. They make crisps and various starchy snacks too.
Back in the bus, we headed north about 200km to Port Pirie, the home of Nyrstar Ltd. This is a major refiner of lead, zinc, copper and precious metals. I have a beautiful aerial picture of the plant, but can't seem to get it down here. No matter- it's not really as beautiful as it is made to appear.
The process is as follows. (Non- Chemical Engineers switch off)
A feedstock made up mainly of lead concentrate is fed into a sintering machine. Other raw materials may be added, including iron, silica, limestone flux, coke, soda ash, pyrite, zinc, caustic, and particulates gathered from pollution control devices. The sintering feed, along with coke, is fed into a blast furnace for reducing, where the carbon also acts as a fuel and smelts the lead-containing materials. The molten lead flows to the bottom of the furnace, where four layers form: “speiss” (the lightest material, basically arsenic and antimony), “matte” (copper sulfide and other metal sulfides), blast furnace slag (primarily silicates), and lead bullion (98% by weight). All layers are then drained off. The speiss and matte are sold to copper smelters for recovery of copper and precious metals. The blast furnace slag, which contains zinc, iron, silica, and lime, is stored in piles and is partially recycled. Sulfur oxide emissions are generated in blast furnaces from small quantities of residual lead sulfide and lead sulfates in the ore.
The whole thing is a great deal more complex- the zinc is recovered by reducing the slag and copper is hydrometallurgically and then electrolytically refined. I've got the flow diagrams if anyone is interested. There is also significant production of silver and cadmium as byproducts.
The plant is the major employer locally and environmental concerns are very real. They have a campaign to reduce the lead concentration in the residents' blood to below 10ppb, for example. If it were a new plant, there's be a lot more protests. But they can't do without it.
This is a view which doesn't include the plant and does take in the Flinders ranges- but the weather was a bit poor for photography.

This was where the students were staying. It's a caravan park with cabins. In this particular case they did better than we did, because we were in a motel that was comprehensively dire- flooding toilets, home- wired electrics, the lot. However, I think it's better for esprit de corps ( and for behaviour in general) if staff and students stay in the same place. I'm not saying whose behaviour, by the way.....

We headed next round the head of the Spencer Gulf, which is the big inlet you can see on the maps cutting into the centre of the South coast of Australia. This is the bridge across the head of the gulf.

The first plant we visited that day was the power station at Port Augusta.

This was a particularly good image of lofting and the application of the Chalk Ridge Formula. The Third Year will be exposed to it in Environmental Issues after the New Year.

And this is the station from a distance. I was surprised to hear that they haven't re-equipped with low-Nox burners. Their reason is the penalty on thermal efficiency, but I think the excuse is that the local coal is very low-sulphur anyway (and the population density around is extremely low!) Ash content, on the contrary, is very high and disposal is a major concern.

Next stop was OneSteel at Whyalla. It's situated in this rather remote region because there's abundant iron ore in three separate deposits within 20 miles. It's brought in using hydrotransport in pipelines. They're very proud that it was a major site of Australian shipbuilding during the war (steel close, good deep water anchorages and as far from Japan as it's possible to be in Australia.) The corvette is memorial to this activity- completely dead now.

The tour round the plant (like the Nyrstar tour) was purely by bus. The most visually impressive part of it was the coke oven discharging.

This is the plant from a distance.

And this is a marine unloading point.

The steel plant is one one side of a headland. The other side is surprisingly scenic!

Next- we head into the interior. More soon!

Update

Liz departed from Adelaide last Saturday and arrived safely in Dublin via Hong Kong and Heathrow. The memorial service for her mother on Tuesday and the interment of the ashes on Wednesday seemed to go off as well as such things can.
She will be staying in Dublin a few days longer to sort things out in her mother's house before it is put on the market. She will then set off for California to stay with her sister and attend her nephew's wedding in Paso Robles, arriving back in Adelaide early in October.
The effect of all this on the blog is that she has the camera with her and, therefore, there will be no new pictures until she gets back. Blogs will be either purely verbal, like this one, or retrospective- like the next.

South Australia tour- first leg

One of the first things we did (in our second week in Australia) was to join in a student industrial tour around the state of South Australia. These are a combination of the regular works visits and (one-time) Easter tours at Edinburgh- Australia is so big that a regular weekly term-time visits programme is not practicable because most of the industrial sites are outside easy reach from the city. These tours are specifically designed for third-year students in a four-year programme and are underwritten by the department, which makes a change from the very ad-hoc way I had to finance the Easter tours. Another difference is that they are accompanied by a group of four or more academics and support staff (technical and clerical.) They are not compulsory for the students, however, and the eventual turn-out was rather poor. Collection of a deposit would be useful in future years. The first (and less well photographed) leg of the tour was the southern loop as shown on the map above. Apologies for any technical content in what follows, but I hope that some people in the Edinburgh department will be following this.
On leaving Adelaide we crossed the River Murray at Murray Bridge and then cut towards the coast, going through a wetlands district called the Coorong which is where the Murray discharges into a series of coastal lagoons, the latter rather under stress. Their salinity has increased markedly due to over-abstraction of water upstream in Victoria and NSW.
The first plant we visited was a paper mill and tissue products factory (Kimberley Clarke) at Millicent. What we saw was the tissue forming and packaging side- more interesting to mechanical than chemical engineers. The pulp mill would have been a better visit and this will be arranged next year.


Here's a picture of the front of the bus and the students- not markedly different from any other student year worldwide. This lot in particular are a rather good advertisement for Australia- responsible, intelligent and friendly (but don't let on that I said so.)

We stayed in Mount Gambier, the students in a caravan park and the staff in a rather nice hotel- another significant difference from the Easter tours! To my mind, this is rather inconsistent with any duty of care. However, there has been no incident so far that has made the papers, thank goodness, though in another year the students were expelled from a campsite for bad behaviour and had to spend the night in a ditch behind a service station.

The local tourist attraction is the Blue Lake (above), a water-filled volcanic sinkhole that is (of course) reputed to be bottomless. The water gets blue later in the year due to copper in the groundwater (despite which it is part of the local drinking water supply system). It was no better than grey when we were there. Another noteworthy feature, for a rather small town, is an excellent Indian restaurant.

From Mount Gambier, we returned to Adelaide via Wynn's Coonawarra winery. This was not very busy when we were there, as the workload is at its greatest at the grape harvest time. They take on a lot of seasonal labour and the technology is deliberately selected to make training easier. The person who took us round had encyclopedic knowledge of the wine business. What I learned was:

(1) unlike European wines, it is not legal to use extraneous enzymes to help the fermentation of Australian wines. On the other hand, it's quite legal to add tartaric acid to adjust the pH and even sugars to increase the initial gravity. This accounts for the very high alcoholic content of some of the local products.

(2) The difference between whites and reds is that the former are imemdiately filtered after crushing and before fermentation, whereas the latter ferment with the skins. So there is a higher filtration cost with the whites. They are also subject to chilling and sedimentation processes after fermentation to remove as far as possible the proteins that lead to clouding.

(3) They don't recover the CO2. This would only be attractive if they produced much more sparkling wine than in fact they do.

The only photos were taken at the very hospitable tasting session after the tour.... I make no apology for the anorak. It was really quite cold.

After this, we returned to Adelaide before the next-morning departure to points North. It was agreed that two visits were not enough to justify the southern part of the tour (which was an innovation this year). If we were prepared to stray over the state border, an aluminium smelter in Portland would be a good addition to the programme next year.

One of the students exhibited alarming swine flu like symptoms on the way back and was escorted to hospital by the first-aider for a check-up. She was back for the first lecture without any trouble. The first-aider was laid up with flu for a week. Such is life.

Next instalment- the really long journey to the far north of the state. It may, in fact, extend to two postings.

Weekend with Stephen and Vivienne

This last weekend we had Stephen and his family (Vivienne, Sarah and Matthew) here. Vivienne is attending a conference in Adelaide this week and Stephen and the children came here for the weekend.

On a threatening Saturday, we went to the zoo. It has a good selection of the Australian favourites such as the kookaburra,

The koala,

and also creatures from the rest of the world such as lemurs

meerkats and many more. Unfortunately we were rained off by an absolute torrent and didn't see everything. On Saturday evening we did some babysitting at the hotel to allow Stephen and Vivienne to get out on their own for a couple of hours.

On Sunday we went to a place called Victor Harbor about 50km south of Adelaide. It's a nice resort and features an offshore island (Granite Island) that is reached by a pier with effective public transport....

A horse-drawn tram. This is very popular with children.

We had lunch on the island and then had a walk round. The views are spectacular in all directions....

Particularly to the north.

The island is a nature reserve and has been repopulated with native species.

For once, we avoided the worst of the weather and didn't get wet at all.

So- a good time was had, but we're still waiting for the hot weather!

Where we live and the way to work

Adelaide was originally planned as two gridiron street patterns, Adelaide and North Adelaide, on each side of the River Torrens. Suburbs have of course sprung up around but the two are surrounded, and separated, by green belt in the form of parks and (being Australia) sports grounds. We live in the south of North Adelaide and the University campus is in the north of South Adelaide, so my walk to work is through the parks and over the river..

This view from the bridge gives a good idea of how pretty the area around the river is.

This shows the bridge from the river bank, with Liz for scale. Actually, it would be a creek or a swamp much of the time, but the level is artificially raised by a dam downstream. No shortage of water at the moment, though- rather the reverse. We can't complain, as it is breaking a drought of a few years and even now the reservoirs aren't quite full.

The department is reached by following Frome Road from the bridge. This is taken from the other (hospital) side of the road. The campus belongs to the State, not to the University, and as a result there are buildings both of the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia. Strange arrangement, but there doesn't seem to be much friction resulting from it.

The green belt also contains the zoo (of which more later) and the botanic gardens. The latter are very nice indeed and a good deal of local pride seems to be invested in them. They have sections devoted to various forms of native plant life, so you can find out what the bush is like in complete comfort (which is not the case in the bush itself!)

This is the Torrens Lake, further downstream and close to the parliamant building, governor's residence and festival theatre (also the main casino, but we'll forget about that.) This shows the fountain reasonably well, but the intention was to capture all the black swans on the grass.

For some reason, all the urban high-rise development seems to be in Adelaide itself. North Adelaide has some very nice shopping centres and a lot of good restaurants and pubs, but has remained residential. There's some very expensive property, too.

So- having found out by trial and error how to manage this thing, how should I go now? (I can hear a collective shriek of "RTFM." ) Obviously, there's a lot to catch up with. What I think I'll do is to alternate postings on current events with retrospective ones covering our earlier activities. So the next will be on our recent weekend with Stephen, Vivienne and family. I'll then do one or even two longer ones on our tour of South Australia with the students, in whioch the wonders of the geography will be revealed.

Until then.

Initial posting

Well, finally I've got round to making a posting. It's been some time, but enough has been happening since we arrived (as some of you know) to put this on the back-burner. We are just coming up to the weekend of 29/31 August and we are expecting our nephew Stephen, wife Vivienne and children Sarah and Matthew who will be here from tonight.

The idea was to take the children to a wildlife park in the Adelaide Hills, but the weather forecast over the weekend is unattractive. There are bad-weather childrens' activities, but less of them and usually expensive!

We'll be discussing the programme over breakfast at their hotel tomorrow.

Tomorrow week Liz will be setting off for Ireland for the memorial service for her mother. Afterwards, she'll be returning via California and the wedding of our nephew Colin.

In the meantime, I'll post a few piccies. These are of the the postgraduate college we were staying in for the first few weeks. The top two are general views of the single-room accommodation and the others a distant view of the cottage we stayed in. It's behind the blooming tree on the right in the second. The first does no more than show the fence! There are common rooms, a refectory, laundry and computer rooms so it's pretty well equipped.

I don't have photos of the rather less attractive place we're in now. But I'll take some and bring readers up to date.

The next few blogs will try to bring things up to date with our experiences so far.