Bioteq Environmental Technologies Inc (BQE)

[junkHustler]

Leadership in International Trade: Asia-Pacific

BioteQ Environmental Technologies’ relationship with the Chinese mining industry continues to deepen. In August it announced it would co-operate with Jiangxi Copper Co.—China’s largest copper producer—on constructing the third in a lineage of mine wastewater treatment plants that would not only cleanse water but recover metals borne in the effluent.

The Vancouver company has built a name for itself in China and throughout the world with both its proprietary technology but also in the ways it does business. CEO Jonathan Wilkinson says that BioteQ enables the recovery of metals from mining waste. Traditional environmental solutions don’t recover the metals, and they leave behind a metal-laden toxic sludge which, as Wilkinson says, “creates its other environmental issues.”

The second second difference is how it makes its solutions available. It can either be sold as a system that mining companies can use on their own, but BioteQ also makes financing available so it can partner with customers to bring environmental solutions to a program. “Many technology companies don’t provide this,” he adds.

For its unique capabilities BioteQ, has been chosen as a finalist in the 2013 HSBC International Business Awards for Leadership in International Trade in the Asia-Pacific region. BioteQ has received this honour before: in 2010 it also finalled in the awards program’s inaugural year.

In the past 13 years, BioteQ has designed and in many cases, continues to operate, water treatment plants in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Australia, Turkey and China for such clients as Capstone Mining, Xstrata, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as well as Jiangxi Copper.

The Jiangxi projects have seen BioteQ putting up half the capital to build a remediation system as well as the technology. Jiangxi provides the rest of the capital and the water that needs remediating. “We’ve recovered copper, nickel and cobalt, and usefully sell that and attain profits from that,” Wilkinson says. BioteQ shares revenues from those sales with Jiangxi, which will vary with the price of copper and the amount of copper in wastewater. But it estimates that both companies will share in $2.4 to $2.8 million in proceeds annually, turning a former mining liability into a new source of income.

He allows that not all contaminated water streams have commercially recoverable amounts of metal, but the Chinese project has proven lucrative. A recovery plant at Raglan, Quebec that BioteQ runs for Xtrata Nickel recovers only small amounts of nickel, which Xtrata retains and that firm pays BioteQ an operating fee. Operating costs for treating wastewater at the extreme northern mine dropped by half after BioteQ began using its proprietary ChemSulphide process.

Treatment approaches vary depending on the unique needs of each site and have to take into account water flow, water chemistry, and treatment intentions. Among its approaches are the abovementioned sulphide process to capture metals, lime treatment, ion exchange methods and sulphidization-acidification-recycle-thickening for recovering gold. BioteQ serves not only the mining industry but also the power generation and oil and gas sectors.

The firm is the brainchild of former CEO Brad Marchant, a process engineer who saw an way to recover metals from mining wastewater treatment. He and some colleagues created a commercially viable method for achieving this and they founded BioteQ in 1998. (Marchant has since left BioteQ to work on another company with an environmental focus: Enterra Feed Corporation.)

As the company grew so did increasingly stringent environmental regulations that obliged the mining industry reduce the amount of effluents from its projects. In turn, mining companies sought out cheaper ways of handling their post-mining liabilities, especially tailings ponds and wastewater. Miners must segregate post mining wastewater and the contaminants it bears in tailings ponds, which are expensive to build and must be maintained in perpetuity. If they could reuse the water or discharge it in a highly purified form they would reduce their costs while meeting regulatory targets. BioteQ has proven so adept at its technology, that in 2009 it treated 7.9 billion litres of wastewater, and removed 2.2 million pounds of metals. Its plants range in capacity from 840 cubic metres a day to 24,000 cubic metres a day.

Much of BioteQ’s business is in China and that has presented its own special set of lessons. “There’s a whole number of challenges you have to work through before you start working in China,” Wilkinson says. Companies need to really understand what they want to focus on in that country and then assess how they’re going to make a viable business there. That requires a Chinese partner firm that “actually fits” your business model and your ambitions for it.

It also requires adapting to the local milieu. “You cannot go into China without building a Mandarin-speaking capability in your organization,” Wilkinson says. “You can’t go into China without expecting to have feet on the ground or the understand that you’re going to have people going over their regularly to ensure you’re advancing your interests with your partner and with your customers. Do your homework, find your partner then build your capabilities and execute, execute, execute. It’s not a simple thing to do.”

https://globalconnections.hsbc.com/canada/en/special-features/hsbc-international-business-awards/meet-the-winners/winner-article-bioteq