Broken Hill regional drill core storage facility announcement of call for tenders

Tenders have been called for construction of Stage 1 of a major new drill core storage facility in Broken Hill for the Mineral Resources Division of the Department of Primary Industries.

The new centre will be located at 42-56 Pinnacles Place, Broken Hill, where earlier this year the Department purchased a 1.7 hectare allotment from the Broken Hill City Council.

The facility will initially hold up to 80,000 metres of drill core and will include a core preparation room, covered and external core viewing facilities, as well as office facilities.

Mineral explorers will be able to view core stored in the facility on-demand, as well as have on-site access to DPIs web-based database technologies. The benefits to the industry will be significant because of the vastly improved access of important reference drill core from the region and its storage in a modern, secure facility.

This new facility will complement the State’s valuable reference mineral and petroleum exploration drill core centre at Londonderry, west of Sydney.

The new facility is being constructed in response to strong feedback from the exploration industry that the Department retain access locally in Broken Hill to important regional exploration drill core, much of which is currently stored on the North Mine lease in Broken Hill. The industry sees the establishment of this facility as a very high priority in its efforts to increase the efficiency of exploration activities in the Broken Hill region.

Tenders will be advertised in the Barrier Daily Truth on December 17th, 21st and 24th as well as on-line from December 19th on the Department of Commerce eTendering website at: https://tenders.nsw.gov.au/commerce/shared/advanced_search.cfm

The scope of works in Stage 1 of this facility involves site preparation, fencing and construction of a 900 square metre building.

The site design and construction is being managed by the Department of Commerce office in Broken Hill, in consultation with DPI expert staff experienced in core storage technologies.

Construction is expected to take around 16 weeks and be ready for fit-out in June 2006.