Gladstone

This weekend I was up in Gladstone QLD, an industrial town about 600 km north of Brisbane. I was up there with the chemical engineering class that I tutor so that the students could see some real industrial sites. The group I was part of visited Queensland Alumina as well as the Boyne aluminum smelter, so we were able to see the entire aluminum production process, from red bauxite pebbles to fine white alumina flour to solid aluminum ingots.

Most of the students had never been in a serious metal production plant before, so this was new to most everyone. The two plants were large, even by resource industry standards. Queensland Alumina produces about 4 million tonnes of alumina per year, about a third of which goes to the smelter in Gladstone to produce 550,000 tonnes of aluminum metal per year. The smelting process for aluminum is very energy intensive thanks to the vicious thermodynamics, and as a result the Boyne smelter uses about 20% of Queensland's electricity.

The safety regulations of both plants prevented me from taking any photos - they don't want you looking down a lens when you should be watching your footing. You can see both plants on Google Earth though - Queensland Alumina, with the clear division between red side (bauxite dust) and white side (alumina powder), and Boyne Smelter, next to the giant red mud tailings impoundment. I also picked up some true Aussie safety lingo - QAL's slogan was "Mates looking after mates", and BSL's is the beautifully eloquent "If it isn't safe, don't do it that way." Short and to the point, I guess.

The place we were staying was right next to a nice beach park, so my photos from the weekend were limited to this area.

I found a few colonies of these green and orange weaver ants that build nests by sewing together clusters of leaves and living in the enclosures. Each nest was about the size of a softball, but one was almost the size of a football.



On the beach I found all these little balls of sand that are apparently pushed out of burrows by the crabs that live in these holes. As the tide comes up and down every day, this has got to be a lot of work.



I also noticed a curious thing in the trees. I saw a number of messy looking spiderwebs that all had leaves right in the middle of the web. At first I figured they were just abandoned/old webs, but then I realized that was what they wanted me to think. Underneath the central leaf in every one of these haphazard webs was a little red spider. Obviously this is their way of hiding from the flying nasties that would eat them if they were exposed.





Finally, a blue feathered kookaburra who was nice enough to pose while I got up close, and some yellow flower.