Parauapebas, Pará – An iron mountain in the middle of the Amazon. This is the best definition for Vale’s operations in Carajás Mountain Range, in southeastern Pará, where the company operates the largest open air mine in the world. It is a land of superlatives, where gigantic diggers and lorries remove thousands of tonnes of ore each day.
This is the scenery ANBA visited on Wednesday (6), as part of the E.torQ Amazon Journey, a car trip from São Paulo to Pará, organized by the Association of Foreign Correspondents, sponsored by Fiat, Goodyear and Tesacom.
The mine produces 100 million tonnes of iron ore a year to supply mainly the international markets, especially China, but the capacity is 120 million. Just to have an idea, it is around one third of the current production by the company, the third largest mining company in the world and the largest in iron ore.
“And that represents just 2.5% of the preservation area of Carajás National Forest," said the general manager for mining in Carajás, Fernando Carneiro.
And what is already great will be even greater. Projects in implementation are going to expand the production capacity to 150 million tonnes by 2013 and, starting in 2015, expectation are for another 90 million, expanding the total to 240 million, that is, double the current volume.
The mine is an immense hole dug from the top of the mountain, an area with less, lower, vegetation in the middle of the forest where the rocks with the ore may be seen. The discovery of the mine was made by geologist Breno Augusto dos Santos, in 1967, while overflying the region and landing in the area that is now one of the points explored by Vale.
There the ore extracted is treated at a mill, which produces 300,000 tonnes of iron ore a day. From the rocks extracted by blasting, three kinds of products are generated: “sinter-feed”, small pieces of iron ore considered the most valuable product, used directly in the blast furnaces of smelters, “granulate”, larger pieces used in pig iron mills; and “pellet feed”, a fine sub-product, almost powder, sent to pelleting mills, for later transformation at smelters.
Production of the mine is shipped on trains on Carajás Railway, which connects the site to São Luís, in Maranhão state. There are 892 kilometres of lines crossing 23 cities. Vale operates 10 compositions a day on the railway, each with 330 wagons, four locomotives and cargo of 33,000 tonnes of ore, as well as a passenger convoy with capacity for 1,300 people going to the capital of Maranhão. Trips go on one day and return on the next, except for Thursdays.
Great exporter
Installations of the complex in Carajás, which started producing in 1985, resulted in the construction of Carajás Nucleus, where 6,000 workers live, as well as resulting in the creation of Parauapebas, initially a settlement and now a city with almost 153,000 inhabitants, as against 53,000 in 1991, according to the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
The city has an impressive per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 23,000 Brazilian reals (US$ 13,700) and is, according to the Ministry of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade, the second main exporter city in Brazil in terms of revenues. From January to August, the city sold US$ 4.17 billion on the foreign market, only behind Angra dos Reis, in Rio de Janeiro, through which oil from Campos Basin is exported, and ahead of São Paulo, the largest and richest city in the country.
The ore is responsible for this value and also for jobs for the local population. Vale currently employs the sons of workers who migrated to the region in the 1980s in search of opportunities.
This is the case with the young Ádila de Oliveira Santos, aged 24, who operates one of the 105 off-road mega lorries used in the mine, in the case a Caterpillar machine. The smiley, well-dressed youth may seem out of place driving a 6.5 metre tall monster that carries 240 tonnes of cargo, but she says it is easier than driving a car.
“The lorry has no clutch, so it is easier, almost everything is automatic," she said. But it is not that easy, as confirmed on testing the simulator on which Vale trains its drivers. “You have to be good at parallel parking," added the girl, whose father was from Pernambuco and whose mother was from Ceará, both having moved to Pará in the 1980s, seeking work.
Ádila participated in the Apprentice Program, a partnership between Vale and the National Service of Industrial Education (Senai), which trains local youths for work in industry.
*Translated by Mark Ament
