Many people dislike Port Hedland because of the never ending red dust and the overt industrialisation that gives the town its reason for being: it is the biggest bulk export port in the world, exporting predominantly iron ore, manganese, lithium, and salt among other things. 

However, we end up spending more time here than we thought we would just because it is all so interesting. We take some tours to find out more about this red dirt town. The Seafarers’ Harbour Tour takes us out into the harbour so we get up close and personal with the massive ships in port. The Twilight Tour takes us around the land based operations that feed the port.  The Eco Salt tour takes us out to the massive salt ponds and tells us about the traditional Aboriginal use of the land and how they are working together in the eco projects.  A city (I use the term loosely) tour clues us in to the history of Port Hedland including the lengths people must go to to batten down the hatches in cyclone season. The building code in Port Hedland is apparently the most stringent in Australia, requiring extensive roof fastening to prevent beheadings when roofing iron flies off during high winds.

Iron ore is the reason for the existence of Port Hedland. The Pilbara holds the biggest deposit of iron ore in the world and the world is hungry for it, particularly China which takes 60% of the exports.  So this blog includes a lot of awesome facts and figures, but I still won’t be able to convey the massive entity that is this production.

More about the Pilbara in a future blog, but we know we’re there as we encounter more and more trucks on the road, quads – four trailers of ore – heading to the Port.  Couple that with huge trucks moving the biggest diggers you’ll ever see and it is wise to pull off to the side of the road when you see the flashing lights coming your way.

The ore is loaded on to very, very long trains for transport to the ships. The trains are three kilometres long and comprise 268 ore cars with a locomotive at each end and two in the middle;  each ore car carries 140 tonnes of ore.  I’ll do the maths for you, that’s 37,500 tonne per train and there’s a train an hour – and this is just BHP. The trains dump the ore, two carriages at a time onto conveyor belts – it takes 30 seconds – which transfer the ore to loaders then into bulk holds on the ship. There are 500 kilometres of conveyor belts around the Port, in case you are wondering. All the conveyors and loaders are autonomous and are run from Perth.

BHP is the biggest player in these parts, followed by FMG and the Johnny come lately to mining in these parts, Roy Hill, owned by the redoubtable Gina Rinehart. Yet Gina made so much money last year she gave all employees a 50% bonus on their salary (this is according to our tour guide). The various companies’ relative holdings are reflected in the number of berths they own for loading (see port map below – PPA are port authority general use). It takes four tugs to bring a bulk carrier in and out of the harbour. BHP own their own tugs, which they had custom built.

At any time there can be 60 ships at anchorage off Port Hedland for two to six days waiting for their turn to enter. Air Traffic control has nothing on the harbour dance. Ships must be a minimum of 14 days at sea (COVID restrictions) no matter where they come from, and when they dock seamen are not allowed ashore. The pilot is flown out by helicopter to bring the massive ships (360 metres long and 60 metres wide) into a channel only 190 metres wide. As the tidal flow can be up to 7.4 metres, there’s two sailing windows over a 24 hour period allowing 5 or 6 ships to come in to load; the turnaround time to fully load is 24-36 hours. When a fully loaded ship departs there is 24 centimetres, yes 9.4 inches, clearance to the harbour floor. And that is what a plimsoll line is for – to show the maximum depth for a fully loaded ship

What’s the bottom line? When iron ore was $100 per tonne, BHP was shipping $95 billion worth of ore a year. The latest price is somewhere around $220 per tonne, so you can double that. We understand it is $15 a tonne to extract, so I’ll leave it to you to do the maths and weep – or buy shares.

Rio Tinto is the world’s largest exporter of seaborne salt – meaning salt that is produced from evaporating seawater, as opposed to the Siberian version of mining salt – 5 million tonnes of salt every year, with most of it going to Asia and the Middle East for industrial use: in glass, industrial chemicals, and soaps and detergent.  We drive out of town to inspect the evaporation flats. The whole farm is 21,000 hectares, so that’s a lot of fish and chips and tequila shots. They say the operations are a biodiversity area with greater than 1% of the world population of Red-necked Stint, Curlew Sandpiper, Sharp-tailed Sandpiper and Red-capped Plover, of which we see none. Port Hedland is also the most important known Australian site for Broad-billed Sandpiper and the endangered Asian Dowitcher – of which we see none. Back in town we watch $4.5 million bulldozers crawl over massive salt mountains. The dozers have another $1million of salt specification protection applied before use, and this is repeated every 9000 hours.

So we are fans of Port Hedland – it isn’t pretty but it is interesting.