Host: Amanda Holloway
Guest: Jessy Parmar | Business Development Manager | Xylem
Category: 🤖 Technology
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[2:49] “Mining is a very unique sub vertical. So it consists of many different processes. And how we examine it is through water management […]. So we divide it into nine separate operations or processes […]. The first one being source water, so where you're going to be […] collecting your water from […]. And there's […] water boosting, […] and process water. […] Sustainability and ESG are very huge within the industry. And so if […] evaluate any given mine, there's about 70% or more process water on site. So when you look at business and the cost of doing business increasing, process water is a huge area of focus for all these mines. Then there's dust suppression, fire protection, […] pipeline inspection. So that ties in directly with ESG as well. […] And then finally, there's the environmental monitoring in the wastewater.”
[4:47] “Every mine’s operation is going to be different and unique in its own ways. But […] what I've seen over the years that has been a common challenge across each of them, one […] is around water quality and scarcity. So water isn't as abundant as we once thought it was, so with that being said, we need to start evaluating recycling our process water. […] Another big topic for mining end users is operational continuity and efficiency. […] And then the third one regulatory compliance […]. There's a lot of pressure from environmental lobbying groups out there. The industrial sector as a whole gets a bad rap when it comes to its effects around the environment.”
[8:31] “The three areas [when working on mining water management are] productivity, reliability and sustainability. So from a productivity point of view, we're looking at production uptime […]. The second one that I mentioned is reliability. With reliability I focus on efficiency. They're they're directly related. So the more efficient your product and the closer you are to your best efficiency point, that's going to reduce the amount of wear and tear that you're going to have on your asset, which in, if you look at the full lifecycle of your pumps, that's saving you a great deal of money. So a lot of these end users within the mining space, don't necessarily evaluate those secondary costs associated [with] unplanned downtime and so they rely on us to evaluate that. And then finally, the last area […] is sustainability. So just being more conscious of discharge rules and respect in the respective regions that we're going to be operating in. And having that visibility, […] so that we give our end users greater visibility on water quality, and […] whether there's going to be a form of treatment that's going to be involved in their process water or if it's safe to discharge.”
[11:50] “We were challenged on a mine site where the end user wanted to have remote visibility on their dewatering, especially in the summer months where they expected heavy rainfall. Given that it was remote there is that added safety that had to be involved. So they were originally using submersible pumps. But […] with submersible pumps, you have to do that physical install on that remote area. So […] we came to propose using a diesel driven use unit for that. That overcame that safety issue. And then we built a custom monitoring control station where they had that remote visibility on their asset, and we're able to monitor and control their operations remotely. So when I think [about] productivity, that's a great example.”
[13:41] “From a sustainability perspective, […] a new area of focus for us is around pipeline inspection. So we were working with an end user and it was more of a proactive measure for them, just because of the fact that they were around a local community and […] because of the environmental aspect, they wanted to check their discharge lines across their operation to see if there [were] any leaks in those discharge lines. […] So we used one of our peer technology inspection tools to see if there [were] any sort of leaks in that discharge pipeline.”
Rating: 💧💧
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify
🕰️ 17 min | 🗓️ 08/24/2021
✅ Time saved: 15 min
Additional Links:
MINExpo 2021
