For their Christmas Creek deposit they will have to updgrade their product like SDL as high silica (greater than 8%) but not as low Iron ore content ie. less than 50% as SDL has.
The main difference between SDL and FMG is that:
SDL will have one large mining pit at Mbalam that will become 300 m deep, FMG has a large area to mine as the deposit are thin seams between 2m and 10 m running 70km from Cloudbreak to Christmas Creek and then down to the Fortescue Marshes. As they go down to the marshes their strip ratio goes from 2 to about 10 ie. whey they have to mine 100 metres of overburden to get 10 metres of ore.
SDL strip ratio of 0.1 is really attractive, mine 10 metres of overburden get 100 metres of ore, and all deposit in one small area not spread out, so your mining costs will not be as bad.
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