TWO Perth engineers are in the midst of building a new consultancy business after securing a major contract on the giant $US1.8 billion ($A2.5 billion) Goro nickel project, located in the Pacific territory of New Caledonia.
Paul Kreppold and Jeremy Green are recruiting up to 30 professional staff to work on Goro, which is majority owned by Canadian company Inco.
The ability of a start-up Perth consultancy to win a substantial contract on a big international project says a lot about how small the global mining industry has become.
Mr Kreppold said the Goro work flowed from the reputation he and Mr Green had established for designing “efficient, for-for-purpose, economical” process plants.
“We’re reasonably well known for our ability to produce such designs,” Mr Kreppold told WA Business News.
That reputation was well suited to Goro, which is proceeding only after a major redesign enabled Inco to significantly reduce its capital costs.
The redesign included a 50 per cent reduction in the process plant’s ‘footprint’.
Inco said this would enhance the plant’s operability and result in considerable savings on concrete, structural steel, piping and electrical requirements.
At the same time the nameplate capacity of the plant was increased to 60,000 tonnes of nickel a year.
Mr Kreppold and Mr Green first started working on Goro in April last year, and Matrix has now been engaged to design steel and concrete structures for its process plant.
Mr Kreppold said he wanted to establish Matrix as a specialist firm in the field of civil and structural engineering for mining and metals process plants.
He hopes other projects will look to engage Matrix in future as a specialist consultancy.
If all goes to plan, he said Matrix should be able to maintain its staff as a team and move from project to project, smoothing its work flow in what is traditionally a cyclical industry.
Mr Green said the firm had already recruited about 20 drafters and engineers and he was confident the remaining positions would be filled, despite the widely acknow-ledged shortage of skilled engineers in Australia.
He and Mr Kreppold targeted people they had worked with previously, who were attracted to the idea of working in a smaller consultancy.
“People want to be associated with a team that has been successful in the past and will be in future,” Mr Green said.
Other projects Mr Kreppold and Mr Green have worked on include Newcrest’s Ridgeway and Telfer gold projects, the Kansanshi copper project in Zambia, and the Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea.
