Which innovations will drive your competitiveness?

Client Needs:

To review possible technologies suitable for treating specific waste streams from the beverage bottling process including Clean-in-Place (CIP) wastewater produced after each flavour change and a “Warmer Water” cleaning loop (greywater). The goal was to identify innovative treatment technology options to maximize water reuse while minimizing cost and making use of available energy in the wastewater via biogas production from the high BOD waste streams. This approach was to be compared to a traditional aerobic biological treatment approach.

Our Approach:

BlueTech set out to review suitable technology and develop an economic model for several possible treatment trains. A technology horizon scan was provided based on BlueTech’s internal Innovation Tracker database, subject matter expert interviews, and patent searches, followed by rationale as to why solutions were selected or rejected. Vendors of selected technologies were contacted for cost estimates based on water quality and flows of several treatment train scenarios. A model was produced that detailed expected treated water quality, sludge production, biogas production, chemical use, labor, and capital investment of each unit operation of several treatment options for the two waste streams of interest.

Results:

Through this work, BlueTech determined that the target waste streams lacked the necessary organic loading to be effectively and economically treated for carbon upcycling and energy recovery. An innovative water reuse treatment train was identified and the client proceeded to demonstration scale work with an innovative ceramic membrane vendor that BlueTech had prioritized and recommended following the study.

Client Needs:

As part of the client’s Water Stewardship initiative, the client was interested in identifying and developing innovative technological solutions focused on de-risking water treatment and water recovery challenges at various assets. The client provided summary overviews for 13 distinct challenge areas across its various assets, ranging from management of near-capacity tailings ponds, pit water, contaminated groundwater, and the need for increased efficiency in legacy zero-liquid-discharge systems. The overall objective was to identify and leverage technology solutions to drive a step-change reduction in water-related risks and/or materially improve cost efficiencies to enable water re-use opportunities.

Our Approach:

The BlueTech team helped complete a “water technology scan” focused on identifying the current landscape of emerging and existing innovative water treatment solutions that could potentially achieve the targeted objectives for the various asset challenges. The scan spanned a huge variety of categories, including biological, chemical, electro-chemical, evaporative, membrane, and ion exchange among others. Upon completion of the divergent scan, our team of subject matter experts conducted a “challenge area – solution mapping” exercise to identify which technologies should be shortlisted for each mining asset/challenge area based on technology readiness, cost, experience in mining applications, and several other factors. BlueTech provided advance preparatory materials and co-facilitated multi-stakeholder workshops with the client, operations teams and external consultants, to discuss the shortlisted technologies and potential treatment trains for the various challenge areas one-by-one. For each asset site, a further shortlisting of technology options was developed out of the workshop for the client to focus on going forward.

Results:

Following the final workshops, the client was armed with a shortlist of 3-5 technologies to be assessed at each asset site from an original list of around 200 different technologies. The client proceeded to undertake site-specific bench and/or pilot-scale trials to further assess the potential of the prioritized technologies in the specific applications. This will ultimately inform decisions regarding technology selection for full-scale deployment.