25 Years of Geovert: Rope Access Maintenance at Gove Alumina Refinery

As part of Geovert's 25th anniversary, we're looking back at some of the projects that shaped the business along the way, and next up is the introduction of rope access to Gove Alumina refinery, transforming maintenance methods for this industry in Australia.

Not every milestone sits in Geovert's geotechnical history. In 2006, Geovert introduced rope access to Alcan (now part of Rio Tinto) at the Gove Alumina Refinery in the Northern Territory, as a way of carrying out inspection and major maintenance work inside the refinery's bauxite precipitation tanks.

The pH 14 hot liquor used to process the bauxite ore caused stress corrosion cracking in the welds, with the potential for catastrophic failure. The methods Geovert developed to deliver this work at Gove went on to transform how major maintenance was carried out in bauxite refineries across Australia.

The tanks stood at over 30 metres high and the defects that needed repairing (including weld cracking identified through inspection) sat inside them. The conventional approach was scaffolding, which was very slow, with access alone taking close to 1,000 man hours to erect, inspect and dismantle. By placing NDT technicians or boilermakers in the tanks to carry out inspections and repairs using rope access, the total time for the same inspection came to just 30 hours.

The scope grew from there, with Geovert going on to perform stress corrosion cracking repairs across 40 bauxite precipitation tanks at Gove, each 35 by 12 metres. The work involved magnetic particle inspection, ultrasonic inspection, thickness testing and major repair works with flux core single-sided butt welds up to 20 millimetres, all delivered by our rope access crew.

The Gove Alumina Refinery closed in 2014 after more than four decades of production and is now being demolished, but our time there remains as an important part of Geovert's history.