Clean TeQ is pleased to announce the successful achievement of formal completion and handover of a ground breaking DESALX® plant at the Fosterville Gold Mine in Victoria, Australia owned by Kirkland Lake.

At the Fosterville Gold Mine in Victoria, Australia, Clean TeQ was engaged to design, supply and commission a two million litre-per-day Clean TeQ DESALX® mine water treatment plant. The plant is designed to deliver a sustainable water management solution by treating mine process water.

The plant construction was completed in late 2019, with commissioning and operations commencing in early 2020. The Company is pleased to confirm that the Clean TeQ designed and constructed plant has now passed the performance tests specified in the engineering, procurement and construction contract and the customer has issued a formal notice of acceptance and completion.

The DESALX® technology consists of two continuous ionic filtration (CIF®) modules in series removing divalent cations and anions present in the water through complementary processes. The CIF® modules contain ion exchange resins that are cycled between columns using air lifts, allowing for continuous operation and regeneration of the system. This system increases impurity removal efficiency, reduces chemical use, and provides protection against fouling. The DESALX® solution is well suited to purification of difficult to treat waste waters with high hardness, sulphate, and heavy metals as well as suspended solids which can foul reverse osmosis membranes. These types of waste waters are common in the mining industry, including acid mine drainage water.

At Fosterville, the equipment provided by Clean TeQ includes a precipitation package to remove Antimony and Arsenic. The effluent from the clarifiers is treated by the DESALX® plant to remove Sulphate, Calcium, and Magnesium with gypsum as the only by-product. The DESALX® effluent is then further treated by reverse osmosis to produce water for re-use. The Clean TeQ system is a key enabling component of the customer’s overall water management strategy.

This Clean TeQ system, as well as the plants recently completed in Oman and Australia, are the first of their type anywhere in the world and have been deployed as part of three different technical solutions. The successful delivery and commissioning of these plants provides strong demonstration of the efficacy of Clean TeQ’s suite of proprietary ion exchange technologies and their versatility for metal extraction and wastewater treatment.