Rio Tinto's Amrun bauxite project expected to support further capacity expansion and technological innovation

Rio Tinto's $US1.9 billion ($2.4 billion) Amrun bauxite project is now 75 per cent complete and the Amrun team is soon expected to award some more contracts associated with the project. Amrun project will produce 22.8 million tonnes of bauxite annually starting in mid-2019.

According to Rio's growth and innovation executive Stephen McIntosh, Amrun resource could support double the amount of Rio’s present production level.

"We have built some capability for future expansions into the foundations of the project itself and so have a view that the resource itself could sustain options for 50 million tonnes per annum and we are [currently] building for 22.8 million tonnes per annum," he said.

Rio's bauxite operations supplied to the alumina refineries on Queensland's eastern coast, but the company is now focusing on selling bauxite to third parties in China.

Amrun is also the testing ground for Rio to exercise much of the "mine of the future" work it has conducted in recent years around technology and innovation. Mr McIntosh said the company had used virtual reality to help explain the project to the traditional owners of the Amrun land.

"We spent a lot of time with the local communities and one of the interesting aspects of that was we actually used a lot of technology for virtual reality so the traditional owners could actually visualise what the site, the proposed construction and key pieces of infrastructure would look like and that was a very powerful tool to allow them to really visualise what this operation would really look like," he said.

Rio will build a remote operations centre for Amrun in Weipa. The project will currently use manually driven trucks but studies were underway to allow a future adoption of autonomous trucks option.

Other than Amrun, Metro Mining is close to starting production at the Bauxite Hills project about 100 kilometres north of Weipa and the company expects first shipments in April with a production target of 2 million tonnes of bauxite per year.

Bauxite was selling at more than $US73 per tonne in 2014, but has traded in the low $US50 per tonne range in recent months, and was fetching $US51.50 per tonne in recent days, according to thebauxiteindex.com.au.