Remote demolition – the Boodarie Iron plant

One of the highlights of this year’s World Demolition Summit will be the presentation that will be made by Australian contractor Liberty Industrial’s directors Clinton Dick and Simon Gill, who will talk about the company’s work on the decommissioning of the Boodarie Iron plant. This project is one of the largest and most complex demolition projects carried out in the southern hemisphere in the last 15 years.

The plant is located in Port Hedland, one of the most remote regions of North Western Australia and was built to withstand the effects of both cyclones and earthquakes. It was within client BHP Billiton’s top 10 world-wide risks.

The key challenge was the demolition of the Hot Briquetted Iron (HBI) plant that consisted of three main structures: a 65 m (214 ft) tall Briquette structure (65m high), a 100 m 328 ft) high reactor structure and a 40 m (131 ft) tall gas plant totalling 25,000 tonnes of steel. Liberty Industrial made use of its fleet of excavators including the largest demolition excavator in Australia – a 230 tonne Liebherr 994 complete with the largest set of grapple attachments ever made by Embrey’s Australia (14 tonne), an EX1200 Hitachi and a number of 70, 46 and 36 tonne Volvo excavators all equipped with the latest shears and grapple attachments.

Liberty made use of Applied Science International’s Extreme Loading for Structures (ELS) software (itself a topic for the conference) to create 3D models of the structures as part of its demolition methodology, a key factor in ensuring that the structures were demolished safely and efficiently.