The Ichthys Field in the Browse Basin offshore Western Australia first demonstrated its potential to be a world-class gas project in 2000. Since then, most likely resource estimates have grown to 12.8 tcf of gas and 527 million barrels of high value condensate.
In September 2008, INPEX (Operator, 76%) and its joint venture partner Total (24%), selected Darwin as the site for the LNG processing facility. Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) Contracts for the Ichthys Onshore LNG facility will be carried out by a JKC Company that joint venture comprising JGC Corp., KBR Inc. and Chiyoda Corp.
2 units Elkomix-135 Stationary Concrete Batching Plant will be specialy designed to work in Darwin area, the place is “WIND REGION C CATEGORY 2” as per AS1170.2 which means this place (the installation area of the concrete batching plants) can be subject to heavy storms and cyclones.
ELKON has exported and successfully put into operation 2 units Elkomix-135 Stationary Concrete Batching Plant to ICHTHYS LNG PROJECT which is one of the world's biggest LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) project with 34 billion USD total investment cost, in Darwin, Australia.
Authorities of JKC consortium and Wagners Company (their partners on concrete production) visited ELKON's factories, besides European concrete batching plant manufacturers in decision phase. This team who was so impressed with ELKON's quality, came to Turkey many times and inspected the production facilities of Elkon in fine detail.
Elkon Concrete Batching Plants, which has the most modern production technology and has the biggest production capacity in Europe, was chosen due to its technological investments (welding robots, serial production lines, advanced paint booths, etc.) after all these visits.
All welding processes are examined by nondestructive inspection methods (radiographic, ultrasonic, magnetic, penetrant) and reported in a detailed manner. Moreover, ELKON has specially redesigned the concrete batching plants against the cyclones in the Darwin region.
2 units Elkomix-135 Stationary Concrete Batching Plant were put into operation by ELKON's engineers in July, 2013 at Darwin. Each plant is equipped with 4500/3000 l. Elkon Twinshaft mixers which has 120-135 m³/hour vibrated concrete production capacity.
Each concrete plant is also equipped with 5 units 150 tons bolted type cement silo which were conforming to the Australian standards. Whole plant specially designed to be placed on zero ground level, so additional concrete foundation was not required. Aggregate feeding into the aggregate inline silo is made by means of special Radial Type Aggregate Prefeeding system in the concrete batching plants. Moreover, T type aggregate weighing system is used in these plants which can reduce aggregate weighing time.