The Australian mining company Mount Gibson will cease operations at its high-grade iron ore mine on Kulan Island, located offshore Western Australia (Washington), after a rockfall on October 16.
Eight days ago, part of the quarry wall collapsed, and no personnel were injured, but the company discovered that on October 24, Mount Gibson announced that resuming mining was impractical after an assessment.
Operations will not resume and production will be halted until the planned closure of the project around October 2026.
Refining will continue using existing stocks for planned shipments in the near future, Mount Gibson said. According to Gibson, the company has the potential to sell from lower-quality stocks that it used for blending.
In July-September, the company sold 550,000 metric tons of raw milk (wmt) with an average iron content of 64.3%. The company has now cancelled its sales recommendations for the year to June 30. In 2026, 3-3.2 million tons of ore were mined.
Mount Gibson has identified 4.1 million tons of residual ore reserves on Coolan Island and sold 2.61 million tons of ore in 2024-25, compared with 4.1 million tons a year earlier.
The company expected an increase in supplies in the last nine months of the 2025-26 fiscal year after mass waste recovery operations were carried out in July and September.
In 2007, Mount Gibson acquired a mine on Kulan Island in the Buccaneer Archipelago off the north coast of the Kimberley region in Washington State. The deposit, which was previously managed by the Australian mining company BHP, contains the highest quality hematite reserves in Australia, averaging over 65% Fe, and has produced over 40 million tonnes of ore.
The Argus iron ore index with an iron content of 65% increased by 40 cents apiece. tonne (dmt) rose to $119.74 per tonne on October 23, while the Argus 62pc Fe iron ore index rose 15 cents per tonne to $105.05 per tonne.
From Tom Major
