TOMRA Wins a 22-Sorter Order for Pilgangoora in Western Australia

PLS is expanding what is already one of mining’s largest ore sorting circuits, and the number itself says something about where sensor-based sorting has arrived

TOMRA Mining has been awarded a contract by Pilgangoora Operations, a subsidiary of PLS Group, to supply sensor-based ore sorting equipment for the proposed P2000 expansion at the Pilgangoora lithium operation in Western Australia. The order covers 22 TOMRA XRT sorters, secondary and tertiary X-ray units, plus project management, specialist tooling, packing and delivery.

That number is the story. Sensor-based sorting spent years being installed a machine or two at a time, as a trial bolted onto an existing flowsheet. Twenty-two units in a single circuit is not a trial: it is a processing decision taken at the scale of the whole plant.

The award sits within PLS’s approved pre-Final Investment Decision early works programme.

Engineering and procurement of long-lead equipment start immediately, but the P2000 project itself still depends on a positive final investment decision by the PLS board.

That distinction matters for anyone reading this as a market signal. Ordering long-lead equipment before FID is a common way to protect a schedule, and it shows confidence, but it is not the same as an approved project. The sorters are being engineered; the expansion is not yet sanctioned.

Built on a circuit that already runs

TOMRA equipment already runs in the site’s crushing and ore-sorting facility, delivered during earlier expansions, and the operation has become one of the industry’s reference cases for large-scale sorting integration.

“The existing sorting circuit has demonstrated the reliability, availability and consistency required to support continuous, high-throughput operation at Pilgangoora,” said Albert du Preez, senior vice president and head of TOMRA Mining.

Reliability and availability are the words worth noticing. In a mining flowsheet, a sorter that works brilliantly but stops often is worse than a cruder machine that never does, because everything downstream is sized around continuous feed.

Du Preez frames the award as evidence of a shift in status rather than a technical breakthrough: “It demonstrates how sensor-based sorting has matured from an innovative processing technology into an established and trusted component of modern lithium flowsheets.”

The economics behind that are specific to hard-rock lithium. Removing waste before it reaches grinding and flotation cuts the energy and reagents spent on material that will never pay, and raises feed consistency for the circuit that follows. At Pilgangoora’s scale, small percentages of rejected waste translate into large numbers.

TOMRA Wins a 22-Sorter Order for Pilgangoora in Western Australia published on The HeavyQuip Magazine.