Alegria Iron Ore Mine, Brazil

Samarco Mineracão's Alegria iron ore mine is in Brazil's Iron Quadrangle, about 4.5km north of the depleted Germano deposit, within the districts of Mariana and Ouro Preto in the state of Minas Gerais. The process plant pumps concentrate via a slurry pipeline to facilities at Ponta Ubu on the Atlantic coast that include two pelletising plants and a shipping quay.
BHP Billiton and CVRD each has a 50% holding in Samarco. Production commenced at Alegria in 1992. The operation employed 1,336 people directly and more than 2,000 via contractors in 2005.

The company is implementing an optimisation project to increase concentrator and pelletisation capacity in the short term, and is also investing in a new concentrator and pelletisation plant, which started up in the first half of 2008. This is expected to make Samarco the world's second-largest exporter of iron-ore pellets.
GEOLOGY AND RESERVES
The deposit consists of low-grade itabiritic ore. Alegria's certified mineral reserves totalled 720Mt in 2005, sufficient to support mining for 20 years after the new concentrator comes on stream. Further exploration has the potential to raise reserves to more than 1,000Mt.
MINING
Itabiritic ore is excavated by bulldozers, loaded by front-end loaders into 177t-capacity trucks and taken to a crushing and screening plant in the blending yard. The ore is blended and stored before transport by belt conveyors to the surge pile.
An overland conveyor system transports the ore over a distance of 4km to the beneficiation plant at Germano.
GERMANO BENEFICIATION PLANT
At the Germano beneficiation plant the ore is screened, crushed and classified to feed the primary mills. This circuit assures sufficient reduction of the iron ore particles. It is then deslimed, deslimed, with the ultrafine material being removed in cluster cyclones before conventional flotation where waste material such as silica is separated from the iron particles. The ore is reground and enters a column flotation circuit.The addition of a roller press in 2004 improved productivity by 7%. The resulting concentrate is slurried with water for pipeline transport.
The concentrator is capable of an annual production of 15.5Mt of iron-ore concentrates, rising to 16.5Mt/y in 2006. Its output in the 2005 financial year was 15.1Mt, of which 13.1Mt came from Alegria ore and 2Mt from CVRD ore.