Vancouver-based MGX Minerals (CSE: XMG) announced today that its engineering partner PurLucid Treatment Solutions has deployed the first advanced wastewater treatment system in Alberta.
This development is part of MGX's quest to move forward with a rapid lithium extraction technology which, the company says, reduces the physical footprint and investment in large, multi-phase, lake-sized, lined evaporation ponds while enhancing the quality of extraction and recovery across a range of brines such as petrolithium (oil and gas wastewater), natural brine, and other brine sources like lithium-rich mine and industrial plant wastewater.
By engaging PurLucid, of which MGX owns 55%, customers will pay CAD $35 per cubic meter for evaporator blowdown wastewater, or EBD processing. "Delivery of first EBD wastewater is expected to occur on November 13th. The system, capable of processing 5 m3/h, is expected to operate at full capacity. The system will take highly concentrated EBD wastewater and treat it to a level suitable for reuse or standard low-cost disposals of clean liquids and physical solids and particulate," the miner said in a press release. The system will take highly concentrated EBD wastewater and treat it to a level suitable for reuse or standard low-cost disposals of clean liquids and physical solids and particulate
In the brief, MGX also explained that deployment of this system, which is currently undergoing flow testing, represents the first scheduled system for installation. The second installation will be a high-temperature 10m3 per hour system, something that would happen in two months.
"The technology provides superior treatment outcomes when compared to conventional technology and can do so without cooling water first. This will result in significantly less energy use for water treatment and also eliminate the single major operational challenge of a steam assisted gravity drainage facility, which is heat exchanger fouling. A third system is currently in fabrication and is a larger-scale version (20 m3/h) of the first system intended to treat one-through steam generator boiler blowdown," the release reads.