Bauxite · Al · 13 · with Ga · 31
Why bauxite. Why Cape York.
One page, restrained.
Aluminium is the metal the AI and electrification build-out is built from, and almost all of it starts as bauxite. Australia is the world's largest producer, and the best of it comes off one landform: the lateritic plateau of Cape York.
A blanket, not a vein
Bauxite is a residual soil: a few metres of aluminium-rich pisoliths left behind where a stable plateau surface has weathered under a wet tropical climate for tens of millions of years. It is mined free-dig from the surface, screened, and shipped. There is no orebody to find at depth; the question is whether the blanket is thick enough and clean enough.
Racks, busbars, airframes
Every data centre rack, transmission line, electric-vehicle body and drone airframe is aluminium. Refinery capacity in Asia and the Middle East keeps growing, and it needs bauxite that meets a specification, not just bauxite.
Gallium rides with the alumina
Gallium, the critical mineral behind gallium-nitride power electronics and radio-frequency chips, is not mined on its own. It is recovered from the Bayer liquor at the alumina refinery. Bauxite is where the gallium supply chain begins.
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The province
One surface, two working mines.
The Weipa plateau on western Cape York carries the best-characterised bauxite profile in Australia: a pisolitic gibbsite blanket, typically 2 to 4 m thick inside the top 10 m, on a mottled ironstone zone and kaolinitic saprolite. Rio Tinto has mined it at Weipa since the 1960s and Metro Mining ships direct-shipping ore from Bauxite Hills to the north.
The province was explored on hand-auger grids in the 1950s and much of it was never assayed. The preserved surfaces between and beside the mines are the question our models were built to ask: where is the plateau that nobody finished testing?
The test
A specification gate, not a discovery hole.
A bauxite permit is proved or killed cheaply. The gate is 35% Al2O3 and an alumina-to-silica ratio of at least 2, and the assay that matters is a Bayer-digest leach for available alumina and reactive silica, not a total assay. Shallow auger holes, a few metres deep, answer it. The second question is logistics: on Cape York the ore moves by road to the Weipa corridor or by barge from the river, and those routes already exist.
What we walk away from: ironstone and silcrete that look like bauxite from the air and are not, and blankets too thin to strip. The false-positive catalogue is half the method.
Where Kinkosa fits
Three applications on the Weipa surface.
Dulhunty East Extended
Surrendered Rio Tinto ground where surface cemented bauxite was confirmed at 47.99% Al2O3 with 37.7% available alumina and 11% reactive silica (sample W5-G, CR 139655), beneath 0.3 to 0.75 m of overburden, re-applied for as one body with the strongest-radiometric southern remnants of the same preserved surface. Historical.
Open in 3D →Dulhunty North Extended
The whole interfluve corridor between confirmed bauxite chemistry to the south and a producing direct-shipping operation to the north-west, held under one permit at the statutory maximum. Five 1957-60 auger holes inside the later EPM 25530 boundary returned 23% to 43% Al2O3. Historical.
Open in 3D →East Weipa
A 27-sub-block edge test of the mined Weipa surface's eastern continuation, adjoining the operating mining lease ML 7024. The adjoining plateau was hand-augered on a 10,000 foot grid in the 1950s and none of the samples were assayed. Direct road access via the Peninsula Developmental Road.
Open in 3D →The discipline
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The status
All three permits are applications lodged with the Queensland department. No field work happens before grant. On Cape York the native title pathway, not the department's queue, sets grant timing. The first-pass program is hand augers and leach assay, and it is designed to be finished inside the first field season after grant.