HIGH GRADE IRON

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20763, 25 June 1937, Page 8

HIGH GRADE IRON

PRODUCTION IN NEW ZEALAND ENGLISH FIRM’S CLAIM By Telegraph—Press Association AUCKLAND Jure 24. Claims that it has succeeded in producing economically by its own processes after some years of investigation of high grade iron from New Zealand titaniferous ironsands practically free from the impurities which in the past have prejudiced the development of an industry are made by the Duffield Iron Corporation Limited of London. It proposes through a subsidiary company, Duffield Iron & Steel (N.Z.) Limited, to move toward starting an industry at Patea, having already secured the necessary lease and authority to take sand from the Patea Harbour Board, which wo%ld produce 25,000 tons of quality ingots a year for export. Plans for eventual extension involve the establishment of similar works near New Plymouth and also at a site not yet disclosed, the relative merits of sand from several localities still being in process of testing at the Corporation’s works and laboratories in England. The nominal capital proposed in the Patea scheme is £200.000 of which Duffield Iron and Steel (N.Z.) would take half. Under the comprehensive scheme it is claimed that export could be developed valued at £1,500,000 per annum, the total labour involved, including consequential auxiliary industries, being estimated at 3,500 with a pay roll of £750,000 per annum.

It is stated that laboratory tests were started in 1928 as an outcome of which the New Zealand subsidiary company was formed. The purpose of the subsidiary was to acquire the New Zealand rights of the Duffield process and to investigate the possibilities of its development in New Zealand, particularly in respect of the ironsand deposits. Several shipments cf Ironsand were forwarded to England from New Plymouth and Patea for experimental purposes. The proprietors of the process were confident at the outset, it is stated, of being able to produce from the sand very efficiently and economically a good average grade of iron at a competitive price with that produced by blast furnace methods, the capital cost of the olant necessary for the Duffield process being only a fraction of the cost necessary in the case of other processes to produce a given quantity of iron. The results have now given a very much higher standard of iron than was anticipated. The Duffield Iron Corporation Limited, in reporting on the tests, made the following comments:—(l) The extraordinary rapidity (20 minutes) with which the magnetic oxides in the sand were reduced to a semimolten state; (2) the gratifying feature that almost all the titanium oxide joined the bath of basic slag, only 0.02 per cent (a quantity considered negligible) being in the iron; (3) the high state of purity of the iron; (4) the economic aspect generally of the procedure. The corporation regards its procedure so far as it has gone as an extraordinarily successful first test of extracting iron so conspicuously free from all impurities.