CORAL BAY NICKEL HPAL PLANT EXPANSION PROJECT

摘要

This Paper will present Coral Bay Nickel Corporation (CBNC) High Pressure Acid Leach (HPAL) Plant Project in the Philippines, mainly its Expansion activities. The original Plant was inaugurated on April 5, 2005 and has achieved its nameplate capacity of 10,000 Ni-Tons/Y in year 2007, where it produced 10, 078 Ni-tons. It was again achieved on the next year, where it produced 10,562 Nitons. The Expansion Plant was essentially designed to more than double the production capacity of CBNC HPAL Plant to 22,000 Ni-Tons and 1,500 Co-Tons in a year. Line-2 is basically a mirror-image of Line-1, where each major process circuit is duplicated. To increase Nickel throughput, the High Rate Ore Thickener type of Line-1 was replaced with a High Compression Thickener type in Line-2 to ensure higher %solids of ore slurry. Moreover, GEHO Pumps operation innovation was introduced by the use of Parallel method, which minimized operation down time. To achieve greater efficiency and high availability rate in the 2-Plant operation, tie-in lines were incorporated in the design, where vital solutions and slurries can be transferred from one Plant to another, depending on operational requirements. The Construction of the Expansion plant was started in year 2006 and achieved its Mechanical Completion on February 20, 2009. After 6 months, Commissioning Completion was achieved on May 2009.