WATER MANAGEMENT
Building strong data foundations
Acquire Technology Solutions recently unveiled EnviroSys 9.4, delivering improved ways for environmental professionals to manage, identify, action and report on environmental data while staying ahead of compliance obligations.
Considering the platform’ s potential use in water management process, IM reached out to the global information management software company, putting some questions to Stuart van de Water, ESG Portfolio Leader.
IM: How‘ deep’ does the EnviroSys team go when it comes to helping organisations and mine sites standardise water quality sampling and analysis programs?
SvdW: EnviroSys is not just about the technology, but also about people and process to ensure environmental teams get real, longterm value with their sampling and analysis programs.
People: Our team includes specialists who understand the realities of sampling in the field, managing a realm of sampling schedules with data coming from a multitude of sources, regulatory pressure and site constraints. When we work with customers, we understand how teams are collecting and using their water data and help everyone, from site level to management, gain an understanding of what‘ good’ water data management should look like.
Process: When we implement EnviroSys into organisations, our focus is defining and standardising their water quality programs. This includes sampling locations and frequencies, parameter lists, laboratory methods, QA / QC requirements and approval workflows. The aim is to create consistent, repeatable processes that can be applied across multiple sites and jurisdictions, while still allowing for local regulatory requirements.
By focusing on process first, we help customers remove ambiguity and reduce errors before data ever enters the system. That is critical for miners building water quality and water monitoring programs and being able to report confidently even when under scrutiny.
Technology: EnviroSys reinforces the processes through technology. The platform is configured so validation rules, approvals, traceability and audit trails are embedded so that standards are applied consistently every time data is captured or ingested.
In practice, this means EnviroSys becomes more than a repository for results. It acts as a control layer that supports people on site, enforces agreed processes and ensures water quality data is reliable, defensible and comparable over time.
IM: How much of this‘ thinking’ can be embedded in software to flag when issues might come up?
SvdW: A significant amount of this‘ thinking’ is built into the software.
EnviroSys captures regulatory requirements, thresholds and site-specific rules and applies them automatically as data flows through the system. Rather than having to rely on time consuming manual checks after results are reported, the software continuously applies this logic at the point of data capture, ingestion and review. In practical terms, EnviroSys can flag potential issues by:
• Validating results against expected ranges, licence conditions and historical trends;
• Identifying missing samples, late results or deviations from approved sampling programs;
• Highlighting anomalies or exceedances as soon as data is received from the lab; and to other Anglo sites in similar regions. Purrington said:“ The HDS site sits within the lower portion of the scale, and this is even with some of the quite impactful aspects of the trial, such as proportion of pawn size and operational guise.”
The company also evaluated the trial against the outcomes related to three hypotheses.
In terms of water savings, Purrington said the trial managed to reduce the consumption of water per tonne of tailings even when battling some fairly significant impacts.
“ In terms of safety, the improvement was twofold,” he said.“ We decreased the impact of a breach by reducing the tails outflow potential and, through desaturation, we are reducing the likelihood of a tailings storage facility failure.”
The final point related to closure, with Purrington saying that the tailings could be“ walked on” days after the completion of deposition, with the majority of the facility able to potentially be closed in a matter of weeks –“ this is a significant improvement when compared with conventional facilities”.
Another trial is planned at El Soldado involving a 250 t / h sand placement unit, which is substantially bigger than the 80-90 t / h unit previously used.
Should this go well, it may lay the groundwork for converting an existing tailings storage facility within the Anglo American portfolio to HDS operation.
Closing the loop
Mine water challenges are no longer defined by discharge limits alone. At many operations, the issue is becoming more complex: how to manage excess water, reduce losses to tailings and maintain compliance on streams the existing plant was never designed to handle.
One of the companies closing the loop in mine water management is Clean TeQ Water, using its technologies to selectively remove contaminants, rapidly dewater tailings and recover valuable metals.
An example of the more selective approach to water treatment is the DESALX ® plant Clean TeQ Water is delivering for Nyrstar at Balen, in Belgium. The plant is designed to selectively remove sulphate and selenium using a membrane-free, two-stage Moving Bed Ion Exchange( MBIX) process integrated with lime precipitation as part of a broader zero liquid discharge strategy.
These high-sulphate, variable waters are often where conventional reverse osmosis systems begin to struggle, with scaling and fouling often leading to very low water recovery, according to the company.
Clean TeQ Water says the same flowsheet at an Australian gold mine reduced sulphate from 1,515 to 700 mg / L, calcium from 300 to 85 mg / L and iron from 5 to 0.1 mg / L at 90 % water recovery, with treated water suitable for aquifer injection under the State EPP.
Tailings storage and management remains one of the biggest water challenges at many mine sites, with Clean TeQ Water’ s ATA ® dewatering technology looking to
International Mining | MAY 2026