Mining in Focus: Sustainable water management in the mining sector

Roch Ripley  0:19  
Welcome. My name is Roch Ripley. I am a lawyer at Gowling WLG, and head of our Vancouver office's intellectual property department. Today we're speaking with Derek Mandel, VP of technology and projects at Saltworks Technologies. Before we get started, Derek, can you tell us a little bit about saltworks and also about your role there?

Derek Mandel  0:41  
Thanks Roch. Saltworks Technologies is based out of Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, and our specialty is in Brian management and water treatment and desalination. We we help a wide variety of industries manage their wastewater meats. And my specific role at the company is as primarily involved in Project direction as well as I have a hand in R&D in terms of process design of more complex projects.

Roch Ripley  1:11  
Thanks, Derek. Today, we're going to be discussing sustainable water management in the mining sector. As we race towards net zero environmental, social, and corporate governance or ESG factors are becoming a bigger priority for investors, shareholders and stakeholders. As a result, mining companies are integrating ESG into corporate strategies and decision making, and facing increasing pressure over issues such as water management by stakeholders. Today, new water management technologies are playing a crucial role in the mining sector to help meet and exceed investors and stakeholders expectations. Derek, you sound like the perfect person to talk to you for this topic. So I'm going to start by asking you can you outline the key water management issues at mine sites today?

Derek Mandel  2:02  
Yeah, absolutely. There's two broad categories of water management at mines. The first one would be water treatment involving ongoing operations. And then the second being water management at end of life of particular mind. And each one will have a unique need, as well as different requirements with regards to call it equipment life and performance. And each one also has an associated risk level as well. So when it comes to things like ongoing operations that's typically trying to meet permitting goals for either water treated or economic goals with regards to reuse of water within your subsystem, we're trying to reduce things like chemical use or, or other categories whereas end of life typically comes with greater liability risks with regards to long term storage of wastewaters, which can if not managed properly, or if something unexpected happens can really cause a whole lot of either financial or environmental concerns such as if those waters are being held back in tailings ponds or other things. And if that ends up being released in some way, as has happened in a few recent large scale events in both British Columbia is another example of a result from a few years ago, which can result in not only environmental damage from the release of said wastewaters, which are often filled with toxic metals and other things. But also concerns to human life, such as one of those tailings dam collapses resulted in the death of nearly 300 people. So a lot of liabilities associated with that. And it's hard to quantify until something goes horribly wrong.

Roch Ripley  3:51  
Thank you for that. And with a focus then on end of life in particular, how are new water management solutions, addressing the water management issues you've raised and the environmental expectations now at mine sites, and what do mine operators and investors need to know? 

Derek Mandel  4:13  
I think something that these operators and owners need to know is that the technology needed to perform these treatments exists today. And it's not it's no longer something that either is not available on the market or is simply so cost prohibitive that it cannot be implemented. So in the grand scheme of things, doing something now with the technology available today can reduce those liabilities which are far out in the future and are much more unknown. So there's been a lot of advancement in the treatment of water technologies, specifically the ability to reach much higher concentrations on brines with men Rate systems which are much more economical than previous thermal systems. And this enables you to treat much more challenging waters, which were previously thought and ignored, and essentially stored and things like these ponds. So there's a variety of ways in which you can approach the problem. And someone like saltworks, or others are ones that can help you steer through what technologies are available and what would end up being the best fit for your fleet.

Roch Ripley  5:31  
So you mentioned their membrane-based technologies. Are there other specific examples of technologies being employed in the mining industry to address water management issues either related to operating a mine site or end of life, whether they be saltworks particular technologies, or other particular technologies used by a other water treatment organizations?

Derek Mandel  5:59  
Excellent question. There's, unfortunately, there's no silver bullet when it comes to water treatment. And this wastewater management, it all ultimately comes down to the composition of your water. So what are other things are in the water, and then what needs to get removed, and then kind of at what flow rate or volume you're working with. So those three factors combined will help you kind of design your water treatment needs and what technologies would be involved. Now, there's pretreatment type portions of the system, there's the membrane concentrator type systems, which are the workhorse of desalination technologies. And then there's also thermal systems such as thermal evaporators, which is kind of a bit smarter than this, but kind of dumb boiling of water, if you will, in terms of getting your, your freshwater back. And with each of those technologies, as you're progressing through, you're typically getting much more expensive in terms of how much it's going to cost you in order to treat that water. So as you are concentrating the water further and further, it gets more and more challenging, and therefore you have to have more specialized technologies involved. But one thing that's nice about what has come about recently as, as the industry has grown, and developed new technologies, such as ours and by others, is that the ability to stretch the limits of what was previously, technology such as reverse osmosis, we can now get to concentrations almost double what was possible, even 10 years ago. And that doubling of concentration in your wastewater means that you've now have to the volume that ultimately needs to get dealt with. And that's a huge factor in terms of either managing the remaining waste or shrinking the size of an expensive thermal evaporation step later on thereby making the entire process more economical.

Roch Ripley  7:59  
So, if I understood correctly, some of the membrane-based technologies, such as reverse osmosis, those maybe preferentially are used during mine operation. And then for end of life when you approach zero liquid discharge, and you want to reduce the amount of waste, for example, currently occupied by a large volume of water, that's when you progress into higher cost evaporative technologies, would you say? That's correct.

Derek Mandel 8:37
Partially, so the technologies involved in such as reverse osmosis and those kinds of membrane concentrators those can be used across the spectrum. So you might have an opera might want to have fun during your ongoing operations, but it can also be incorporated into the design of the system in terms of end of life. And there's just different versions of those membrane concentrators. There are ones that are designed to handle high concentrations and you know, high scaling potential and kind of at process risk, if you will, and then ones that are kind of meant to take it easy, if you will, and the in the grand scheme of things in terms of design, having a membrane system as part of your treatment train and it may involve one or two or more steps, having that membrane system involved is going to make your system much more economical. So, we always like to say that the purpose of the membrane system is to try and shrink the size of your evaporator. So however much you can squeeze out of your membranes means you are going to be doing better overall in terms of your treatment. So even if you're designing that zero liquid discharge, treatment train, if there's room to install, for example, and ultra high pressure Reverse Osmosis System which is operating at 1.5 times the pressure of a traditional seawater reverse osmosis system, then that's going to, you know, that could easily reduce your brine by half, before you even hit it with that thermal evaporation step. And that same system could easily be employed during your ongoing operations as well if either water use is a concern, or if you're wanting to kind of get ahead of this end of life concentration, so it can fit in a variety of places in the process.

Roch Ripley  10:32  
So it sounds like there are a bunch of different technologies, potentially complimentary, and then a bunch of different use cases, which of course depend on the nature of the mind. With that in mind, do you find that most of the solutions in this space and perhaps the one saltworks offers? Do they necessarily? Are they bespoke? Or is it also are there also turnkey solutions that are available in the industry?

Derek Mandel  11:05  
I guess, the way that we typically approach it is that we have a bunch of tools in our toolbox, if you will, and choosing the right tools for the job is important in terms of designing that treatment train. And so you may need, you may need a pre filtration system upstream, you may not, you may be using a reverse osmosis membrane concentrator, you may be using an electro dialysis and EDR concentrator. So we've emerged a bunch of different tools that are available, and other vendors offer similar products and services. So it's not like we're inventing anything particularly new, these are used widely across the industry, where we believe we add value is in terms of optimizing that process design, to choose the right components that are going to be the most robust and economical for that particular use case. As well as offering highly differentiated versions of that technology that we believe to be particularly smart, and operate with high levels of automation and controls to make sure that there's kind of minimal operator need to make sure that they're always running at peak efficiency.

Roch Ripley  12:20  
Derek, I'm going to ask you to look into your crystal ball. And tell me what you think the future of water management at mine sites is to assist mining operations in reducing environmental footprints.

Derek Mandel  12:37  
So trend that we've seen across a variety of industries. And so this extends a little bit beyond mining. And so I'll just kind of lend my expertise that I've seen elsewhere is that there's a driving trend, both in terms of government regulations, as well as shareholder push for essentially removing liabilities of water treatments and those liabilities associated with environmental issues. And this applies to both ongoing operations in terms of wanting to call it invest in a green company, and people who have that environmental, social governance during operations, as well as end of life and kind of not leaving any of those things on the table. So general trends in the industry is has always been working towards higher water recoveries. And what that means is that if you have a water and you can recover fresh water from it, then you can ultimately you're concentrating it further, but you're getting more water out, and you're leaving less kind of waste of it to you know, to have other issues so that it can either be disposed of or you're just the volume and kind of manage manageable risk goes down. So what we call that is minimal liquid discharge, or zero liquid discharge. So you may see these notes around the industry, it's MLD, or ZLD or "zee-el'dee" for American counterparts. So if you see those terms, what they mean is you're taking the water and you're trying to squeeze as much good fresh water out of it. And so, you know, previously, you might have had requirements where you're just trying to get about 50%25 recovery. So that means if you had 100 liters of water, you're getting 50 liters of fresh water out. And you're leaving 50%25 of it behind. But 50%25 is a lot, especially when it comes to the volume of these ponds, which could be millions of cubic meters. And so what we're seeing now is there's a lot of industry interest and also trends in terms of purchasing design is high recovery systems. So now we're talking about things like 90%25 water recovery, 95%25 water recovery, 99%25 water recovery. So we're currently designing a system that's intended to be entirely full zero liquidus Search for a mining company. 

Derek Mandel  15:01  
So we are extracting 98.5%25 of available freshwater from that particular water source. And the reason we can't get to 100%25 is that 2.5%25 is the solid salt that gets leftover, which will ultimately get rich either returned for reuse within the industry, or a small portion of it going to a landfill. And so those ultra high recovery projects are going to ultimately become the norm as water gets more scarce just around the world. Because it is a very precious resource. And it's going to become more expensive to either obtain water. And therefore you will want to have technologies to reuse it within your process. Or more much more expensive to manage waste, because there's a very limited location in which you can put these high concentration bright waist. And so by and they're typically all done by volume. And so the more you can squeeze down that volume, the more manageable it becomes.

Roch Ripley  16:06  
So it sounds like we are trending towards higher recovery rates, less discharge. And yes, that does require more advanced technology. And it does cost more, but it's where the world is heading. Do you think you think that's correct?

Derek Mandel  16:26  
I would like to think so. And I'm not just saying that, selfishly from a perspective of as a vendor in the industry, I do truly believe that. Higher recoveries will be necessary. And the great thing is, is that the technologies do exist today. And those who adopt now and later, will benefit from wider adoption of technologies always ends up bringing down costs as things become much more universal and accepted. And so I truly believe there will be either minimal liquid or zero liquid discharge in all of these locations at some point in the future. And it's either going to be required by the governments of the world, or by the shareholders of those companies.

Roch Ripley  17:16  
Thank you, Derek. This was a fascinating discussion. If our listeners have any questions or want to connect, how can they reach you?

Derek Mandel  17:24  
So feel free to reach out to Saltworks, we can be found at saltworkstech.com. So and if you have an interesting project that you would like us to look at, we're always open to doing desktop studies and helping you evaluate your situation. And for that you can email us at projects at saltworkstech.com.

Roch Ripley  17:47  
 Thank you very much.