Geography, climate and resourcing put a capital ‘C’ in logistics challenges for North Queensland miners.

TransBulk Logistics chief executive officer Paddy Byrne will detail the contribution of effective logistics as a keynote speaker at the upcoming North West MPX mining conference and expo in Mount Isa, July 12-14.

Molehills could quickly turn into mountains in the mine-to-market flowsheet when you have to traverse long distances over varying country, Mr Byrne said.

They even had a term for it called the ‘Wicked Problem’, he said, “because all participants in the supply chain see a different version of the problem and the inherent complexity sees the problem shift”.

“This is debilitating for a shared supply chain as it is difficult for the government, at all levels, to know how to support industry to get better outcomes – particularly on rail lines due to their capital intensity,” Mr Byrne said.

“To utilise a rail efficiency, you need to have high volumes over long terms, to allow those big assets to set themselves up. And that doesn’t always necessarily connect or line up to the nature of a geological resource.

“Particularly if you’ve got a small mine with a small reserve base and limited life of mine, but you really want to get the product onto rail, because it’s the cheapest and best way to move it. 

“This is where supply chain coordination and collaboration among participants can have a real benefit for existing rail users and at the same time enable aggregation of the smaller mines to be able to pool their needs and share timing risks.  

Coordinating to increase volumes

“Collectively the increased volume on rail is then the greatest contributor to reducing costs for everyone.  

“Reducing costs in a way that allow logistics providers to run their assets optimally has compounding positive benefits across the corridor.

“(Logistics) It’s not an afterthought, it’s a real discipline in itself. It’s a professional field of endeavour. And if you get it right, you can have really significant advantage over competitors, over international competitors.”

The Mount Isa-Townsville connection was an outlier in the logistics world but other domestic systems and processes in areas around Australia offered the chance to cherry pick a way towards a solution, Mr Byrne said.

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“Part of the challenge in the North West we have is that it’s not an interconnected set of railways, like there are a lot in North America, or even to a certain extent in New South Wales. 

“And in that situation where you have lots of different rail lines interconnecting, and lots of different volumes, and lots of different commodities moving, you are afforded more opportunity for coordination and collaboration. 

‘The challenge is a very unique one in the Mount Isa-Townsville line, in that it’s a very linear bit of infrastructure. 

“It doesn’t have crossover and connection and it is a long distance and it goes over a very, very challenging country.”

Coordination, collaboration and the intelligent use of technology would go a long way to alleviate some of the bespoke issues facing the logistics industry in North-West Queensland, Mr Byrne said.