CAPS Australia has tapped into the boom of service provision for international resources projects, delivering the largest air skid package ever manufactured in Australia to the southwest Pacific.
The company signed a $4.5 million contract to provide mining giant Xstrata with the turnkey compressed air skid package at its Koniambo nickel project in New Caledonia.
CAPS engineering manager Alan Kemp said the project’s location provided several challenges, including implementation of wind and earthquake allowances.
“This project had many unique considerations and because of the remote location and extremely difficult logistics involved, our primary aim was to complete as much of the package, including the heat of compression dryers in Australia prior to being shipped to New Caledonia,” Mr Kemp said.
“The remoteness and local environment there meant that labour and materials were scarce and extremely expensive so in order to overcome this, all pipe work was prefabricated and galvanized prior to shipping which called for a high level of accuracy and modular construction.”
The first two stages of manufacturing were completed at CAPS’ Welshpool facility and included full assembly of the entire plant, rigorous testing and simulation followed by pack down into 40 shipping containers, which were sent to New Caledonia in August.
The final stage involved assembling, testing and commissioning the plant on site in New Caledonia.
CAPS director of sales and marketing Glenn McIntyre said the company had experience with large resources project, including Gorgon LNG.
“A lot of the resource projects have started again, which were on hold for the last 12-18 months due to the GFC. We’re pretty optimistic about what’s going to happen over the next 12 months,” Mr McIntyre said.
“About 40% of what we do is heavily modified. We take a standard package and modify it to customer’s requirements. There are not too many suppliers in the mining space that will do that.”
Blake Wilshaw