If Mount Isa is the industrial muscle of North Queensland and the Great Northern Railways and Flinders Highway the arteries, then Northern Stevedoring Services is the heart.
NSS pumps the essential products in and exports the refined product out of what is one of the largest minerals provinces in the world.
Recent consignments highlight the flow.
That included the discharge of 23,000t of coal used to stoke the furnace in the Mount Isa copper smelter. The coal is housed in a bulk shed on the NSS lease at Port of Townsville and fed to Mount Isa Mines as needed taking the onus of storage from the client.
A shipment was recently discharged at a record rate of around 200t/hour using a mobile harbour crane.
NSS has a 550 Liebherr mobile harbour crane in Townsville and a 420 Liebherr mobile harbour crane in Gladstone.
The Townsville based crane has an outreach of 54m and is designed for bulk cargoes in the Capesize ship class.
NSS has also been instrumental in helping manage an industrial transition in the North West by supplementing copper concentrate feedstock for the Mount Isa Mines smelter. NSS has another 10,000t shipment due new week to discharge for one of their clients.
This is in line with maintaining optimum production levels at the smelter.
NSS is also handling imported copper anode enroute to Copper Refineries Limited in Townsville where it is further processed to meet industrial standards.
The Mount Isa Mines mining, smelter and refinery network are a big part of the innovations which saw MIM recognised for its contribution and inducted into the Queensland Business leaders Hall of Fame in 2010.