Case Study: BHP Billiton

526 Words2 Pages

BHP BILLITON
BY CHARLIE WACKETT

1). BHP Billiton is one of the biggest mining companies in Australia. They branch out in to all sorts of minerals but the one that I have chosen to focus into is an Iron mine. The mine is located north of Perth. It is called the Area C, their main mineral that they mine there is iron. It’s coordinates are 22.919955°S 118.974471°E. This mine was opened up in 2003 and is owned by BHP Billiton, Itochu Minerals (8%) and Mitsui Iron (7%). Each year this mine puts out 55 tones of iron, which is enough iron to make 20,000 tables at your school. This is why it is really important to make sure that there are iron mines. As you can see on source 1, most of the mines in Australia are based in Western Australia. The mine …show more content…

There can be many types of negative impacts on the environment when you mine, “Mineral expiration can have a negative impact on the environment. Its effect depends on the scale of exploration and what equipment is used in the exploration phase” (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006). The first big problem when it comes to iron ore mining is when you have to de-pump the water to access the iron ore, the reason that this is such a big problem is that the water that they get rid of generally goes back on the surface which is generally toxic due to the different minerals that are found that deep under ground, this can cause the clean water to become toxic and kill off a lot of fish and marine life. The reason that this needs to be done is because there is not many other ways that are cheap to get the ore exposed. The second impact on the environment is the extraction of the iron ore and the making of the steel. The reason that this is a problem is because it takes a lot of energy to extract but you do not get a lot of iron compared to the amount of energy that you put in. This is a problem because this means that we have to make mine a lot more coal to produces power, also because Australia does not have a iron ore processing plant so that means that we have to sell it to China and then buy it back once they have processed it this means that China can easily just sell in back for more. The third problem with iron ore mining is deforestation. This does not seem like a big problem but this means that when we make a new mine we will cut down trees in a massive area to make space for the mine. This is really bad when it comes to open-pit-mining, as there is no part of the mine that is under ground. Deforestation is bad because it one make it harder for the other trees to process CO2 there for making less O2 in the air and poisoning our ozone layer in the upper

More about Case Study: BHP Billiton

Open Document