A state of the art desalination facility at Queensland Nickel’s Yabulu Refinery near Townsville is making possible extensive reuse of process wastewater. As a result reliance on bore water has been reduced and the risk of discharges from overflowing tailings ponds into environmentally sensitive waters near the Great Barrier Reef, has been eliminated.

The 10Ml/d facility, built and operated by United Utilities Australia under a long term contract, combines innovative reverse osmosis technology with Australian operations know-how and incorporates leading edge chemical free membrane technology.

Until the commissioning of the new facility, used process waters which are brackish and unsuitable for reuse, had been stored in a large tailings dam on site.

Now, tailings dam wastewater is pre-conditioned for iron removal before being pumped to the water reuse facility. Here, the water passes through a conventional micro filtration process, which removes particles larger than 0.2 micron. In the next stage the partially treated water passes through a medium pressure reverse osmosis plant, which removes mineral salts.