Pilbara Minerals awards $15m contract to local JV

Local businesses SIMPEC and IronMerge have secured their first contract as a joint venture, providing upgrades to Pilbara Minerals' lithium operations in Western Australia.

It comes about a month after SIMPEC, owned by listed company WestStar Industrial, formed the JV with indigenous-owned IronMerge. 

The contract is for stage one improvements to the Pilgangoora lithium-tantalum project, which sits 120 kilometres south-east of Port Hedland and produces at a rate of about 330,000 tonnes of spodumene (lithium) concentrate per annum.

Pilbara Minerals is completing a series of plant improvements at Pilgangoora, expected to unlock an additional 10 to 15 per cent (up to 50,000tpa) of production capacity.

The company has allocated about $22 million to the improvements.

The SIMPEC-IronMerge JV will perform all vertical installation works on stage one of the project, including earthworks, civils, fabrication, structural mechanical, piping, tanks, electrical and instrumentation works.

Pilbara Minerals also plans to restart Altura Mining’s adjoining operations of the same name (Pilgangoora), which it acquired from the lithium miner’s administrators in January for $US175 million.

Timing for the restart is subject to both an engineering assessment (under way) and an evaluation of market demand and price conditions.

Shares in Pilbara Minerals closed down 8.2 per cent to trade at $1.01 while WestStar closed up 11.8 per cent to 1.9 cents.