Iron ore is found in every state in Australia, and the state with the most iron ore ore is Western Australia.

It's just that although Western Australia is rich in iron ore, the mines that have been explored have not given Yang Peiqi a chance to intervene, because these mines have been monopolized by the two mining giants.

Western Australia is home to more than ninety per cent of Australia's total iron ore discoveries, mainly in the Pilbara region. There are a total of thirteen mines in the region, six of which are operated by Hamersley, Rio Tinto's subsidiary in WA, two by Rob River and five by Broken Mountain, also known as BHP Billiton. In addition, there are iron ore mines near Coolie Jonabine and Cockatoo Island in Western Australia.

Near Port Hedland in Western Australia, BHP Billiton owns an iron refinery.

Although much of Western Australia's iron ore is already monopolized by the two mining giants, Yang believes this is where he is most likely to find a big iron ore mine.

Before coming to Western Australia, Yang Peiqi found a lot of information about iron ore in Western Australia on the Internet, and what interested him the most was the discovery of iron ore in Western Australia.

In fact, the discovery of iron ore in Western Australia was also a very fortuitous and legendary event at that time.

In October 1952, at the age of 43, Hancock flew a small, single-engine Auster plane with his wife, Hobb, to Perth, the capital of Western Australia.

Hancock is a small farmer in Western Australia and a veteran pilot. For the sake of his family's ranch business, he had to fly in the sky a lot.

Over the Hammersley Mountains, thick cumulonimbus clouds suddenly flanked the small plane from all sides. The clouds ahead were too high for the small plane to cross, and the same thick clouds cut off their route back.

It's a life-or-death contest, and the only way out is to go down and fly below the clouds.

But the clouds are getting lower and lower, almost touching the earth. In desperation, Hancock flew into a huge canyon. He was familiar with the area, and deep in the canyon was the rushing Turner River, a natural diversion route.

This is a wild place that white Australians have never set foot in.

In the midst of the rainstorm, Hancock piloted the plane cautiously, flying almost close to the treetops.

At this moment of crisis, Hancock was shocked to find that under the washing of the torrential rain, the gorge walls on both sides still showed a red luster, a special red, almost brown and rusty. Hancock, who was familiar with the deposits, immediately realized that these were exposed iron ores. He's flying in a canyon made of real walls of copper!

He was thrilled by the discovery. It seems that God deliberately chose a special moment to give a heavy gift to the petrel in the storm. What Hancock saw was the largest iron ore ever discovered on Earth.

Hancock battled a storm when high-grade iron ore mining in the Mesabee Mountains of Minnesota, USA, dried up. This large iron ore mine is one to one hundred and five kilometers wide, one hundred and fifty meters thick, and one hundred and eighty kilometers long. The ore contains more than 70% iron, so it does not require any treatment before smelting and can be fed directly into the furnace. And not far away, Pennsylvania's anthracite mines, provide ample energy for smelting.

Meineng became a real "Meshabi" (Indian word for "giant"), and it was the Meshabi iron ore that was forged.

This catastrophic news caused panic in the West.

At that time, the Australian government was very resolute on the issue of iron ore, making it clear that Australia's iron ore would never be allowed to be exported!

Such a strong sense of self-protection comes from Australia's strong iron deficiency. Experts and politicians firmly believe that iron ore is a scarce resource in Australia, so it must be used entirely in domestic construction and must not be exported.

After Hancock discovered the iron ore, he began the preliminary work with perseverance. He carefully explored an area of at least more than a hundred kilometers along the veins. And the ore specimens he extracted, after repeated tests, were found to be even higher than the American smelting standards.

This means that the iron ore here can be fed directly into the smelting furnace to become steel!

But he was soon disappointed, and politicians in Perth and Canberra simply did not believe that a farmer from the bush with only a secondary school education could find high-grade iron ore in the barren Australia, which had been sentenced to death by experts.

At that time, Hancock had to obtain a concession granted to the discoverer by the government, and before that, he could not even sue any miner for his discovery, otherwise his own rights as the discoverer would be difficult to protect.

The problem was that not only did the government not believe that he had discovered high-quality iron ore, but according to the law at the time, both the federal and Western Australian governments strictly prohibited the mining of new iron ore in order to achieve the government's tight control over the "depleted" iron ore resources.

Hancock had a hard time getting the Discoverer's concession.

Luckily, Hancock is not only a persistent man, but also a wealthy man. Not only did he support all the exploration out of his own pocket, but he also made a lot of investments in parliamentary lobbying.

The bitterness of dealing with the bureaucracy was well felt not only by Hancock, but also by later legislators, who criticized the incompetence of the government at the time as one of the repertoire on various occasions in the memory of Hancock.

Eight years later, the Australian federal government officially recognized Hancock's development privileges in the Pilbara region as a discoverer. But the capital required to develop an iron ore mine within a radius of hundreds of kilometres is by no means affordable for a single farmer, or even Australia's small economy.

After countless encounters and blindings, Hancock finally got to work. Sir Dukan, CEO of mining giant Rio Tinto, has made a personal decision at his London headquarters and can give it a try. What moved them was that it was Hancock who persuaded them that he only needed to extract the royalties after the fact, and if there were no deposits there, Rio Tinto would have nothing to lose.

After Hancock took them to the site several times, Rio Tinto finally made up its mind. Rio Tinto negotiated a condition with Hancock that Hancock and his relatives and friends would completely withdraw from mining in the area, and that in return and compensation, Rio Tinto would give Hancock a royalty of 2.5 percent of its annual mineral sales. This remuneration, in the year of mining, amounted to 25 million Australian dollars.

In hindsight, it was not a win-win deal. Hancock doesn't have to invest in development and can sit on a hefty annual royalty, while Rio Tinto ensures that it has full control over the development.

Years later, some of his peers joked with Sir Dukan: "You are so stupid that we would not have done this if we had paid such a high royalty to Hancock." ”

Sir Dukan immediately retorted, "So you don't have a big iron mine like us!" ”

Hancock's sudden riches are natural in the eyes of Australians. After all, he made irreplaceable achievements for Australia to take off the hat of poor iron ore households, and it was in a very difficult political environment, with his own and his relatives and friends' funds, at his own expense to carry out geological and political exploration.

Hancock's flight log shows that he spent more than 7,000 flight hours on prospecting, and was seen by Australians not only as a lucky hero of fortune, but also as a persistent pioneer of the nation.

Hancock's discovery has made Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, and Australia's large and small iron ore producers, but from the 2010s to now, the mining area in Western Australia has basically been carved up, and Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, two behemoths, are basically the overlords of Australian iron ore.

With Yang Peiqi's current strength, it is not only very difficult to buy the mining rights of the big iron ore from the hands of these two overlords, but also has to pay a great price. And he can't afford such a price. Not to mention the fact that after the purchase of mining rights, the amount of money required to build a railway for transportation in the mining area and a port to the sea is even more astronomical.