Remote water treatment a specialty for BioteQ Environmental Technologies

A recently completed wastewater treatment plant for a Yukon copper mine owned by Minto Explorations Ltd. is the latest in a string of similar contracts for BioteQ Environmental Technologies, Inc. of Vancouver.

The company, which specializes in the treatment of industrial wastewater, has built eight plants in Canada, the U.S., China, Australia and Mexico, with additional projects in design and construction.

The Minto Mine is a high-grade copper mine with gold and silver deposits, located 240 kilometres north of Whitehorse —about a 20-hour drive.

The water treatment plant is designed to treat up to 4,000 cubic metres of wastewater per day and employs a sulphide treatment process to remove metals from wastewater before it’s discharged.

“We had already been working at the mining operation, providing in situ water treatment,” said Tanja McQueen, vice-president, corporate development with BioteQ.

“As a result of that work, they engaged us to design, build and operate a permanent water treatment plant. As a design/supply/operate contract, it was a great incentive for us to design a plant in a way that makes it easy to operate and maintain. One of the strengths of the company is that, having already treated water for the client, we were able to quickly design a plant that would be custom-tailored to that wastewater stream, speeding up the integration of the project.”

The mine is a seasonal operation, and suspends production during the coldest winter months, so BioteQ needed to build and install the treatment facility during the idle period.

It was essential to have the treatment plant operating before spring snow melt and run-off, which creates a source of water that also needs to be treated when it collects in the central pond used to retain wastewater.

“The recovered metal value for the wastewater is low, so this was primarily a treatment plant,” said McQueen.

“At four million litres per day, it was a relatively small plant for us.”

Minto Explorations built the shell of the new treatment plant to BioteQ specs using pre-fab components, before wastewater treatment equipment was delivered.

Local contractors helped complete the facility.

“We prefabbed everything off site, so there was no winter building,” said McQueen.

“All of the components were skid mounted and moved up to the site by truck. We tend to fabricate the components close to where we are delivering the plant.”

That in turn means regardless of where they are — the Yukon or Arizona — they’re always looking for reliable local suppliers.”

The treatment plant, with a total project value of about $2 million, was installed and tested over the winter, commissioned in late May and began operations in July.

“We currently have a three-year operating contract with an option to renew,” said McQueen.

“Although the treatment process is fully automated, we typically have a crew of four to six people ensuring safe operation and performing maintenance at the site.”

BioteQ said recently it will build a third water treatment plant in China for Jiangxi Copper Co., the country’s second-largest copper company.

The $3-million project, to be built at the Dexing mine, will use ion-exchange technology to recover cobalt and nickel from the mine’s acid wastewater.

Unlike the Minto project, the Chinese treatment system will be designed to recover as much as 23,000 kilograms of nickel and 27,000 kilograms of cobalt from the wastewater stream every year.