In a bid to meet the demand of treated water in mining projects, packaged water treatment plant is an ideal solution. The plant is user friendly, installed, operated and maintained with minimum time and effort. Package plants are self-contained, movable units used for providing treated water. Depending on the suppliers or customers preferred procedure, the plant can be pre-assembled and transported to site or assembled on site.
Water treatment systems treat various water types used for different purposes, such as drinking, waste, and industrial applications. Remote locations, extreme environmental conditions, significant fluctuations in water quality and varied contaminants are some of the greatest challenges of mining sites. Because of high contamination levels and quality fluctuations, each mine requires an individually designed wastewater treatment system. Systems are customized to ensure that treated effluents meet site-specific conditions, including all environmental guidelines, and the required quality to allow water reuse.
Packaged water treatment plants are vital in servicing the construction area and operations camps. When you need packaged water plants for your project, you must consider easiness of transportation to site, easy lifting into position and security of investment. Gary Tait, Managing Director of Water Process Management says water treatment plant must be designed and installed to suit the specific needs of each client in Africa. Water treatment service providers must comply with health and safety requirements on clients’ sites and all staff must undergo thorough medical assessments.
WPM is based in South Africa, Mozambique, Kenya and Namibia and provides a wide-range of services within the water industry, across South Africa and Africa as a whole. The primary focus of WPM is of Sales, Installations and Services of medium to large rated Packaged Water Plants. WPM further has a large experienced service department to service new or existing water plants across Africa.
Plants recently installed
A large mining project in the Democratic Republic of Congo has received a total of seven modular water treatment plants – four to treat domestic sewage, and three for supplying drinking water – from Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies South Africa, a subsidiary of Veolia Water. The plants will service construction and operations camps in the area. Six of these plants will be installed at a construction-phase gold mine in the north eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to support construction, maintenance and operations staff, while one of the drinking water plants will be installed at an important trading post nearby. The largest of the wastewater plants will treat 3 000 litres per hour to serve roughly 300 people.
“These plants use trickling filter technology that is ideally suited for operation in Africa,” says Warrick Sanders, Project Engineer at Veolia. “Trickling filter plants are robust and recover easily from power cuts with minimal disruption to the biological processes. With typically one to two sets of motors being the only moving parts, these plants need minimal maintenance.”
Veolia’s modular plants are assembled to 95% completion at the company’s Sebenza factory in Johannesburg. They are completely containerised for easy transportation and scalability, and need minimal setup once on site. “A decentralised plant has been used on this site to generate potable water for other areas of the plant,” says Sanders. “These plants can also be relocated to a different camp site once construction or other operations have been completed.”
High-end containerised water plant for Kansanshi Copper Mine
Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies South Africa also provided a containerised water treatment plant – built into six 40-foot shipping containers – to the Kansanshi Copper Mine near Solwezi in Zambia. Nigel Bester, Project Engineer at Veolia’s Engineered Systems and Services division says the new Kansanshi smelter had very specific requirements for boiler feed, process and drinking water.
“The plant has been designed to ensure maximum viability, so we have taken a high-end engineering approach to match each treatment stage’s water with the mine’s requirements. This means that boiler feed water, for instance, isn’t subjected to all the treatment steps necessary for drinking water, which is much more viable than treating all the feed water to high-quality drinking standards regardless of its application,” said Bester.
“We have an extensive footprint throughout southern Africa, which means we can service our clients comprehensively. As part of the global Veolia, we further have access to some of the best technologies, which means that, overall, we provide the entire, fully engineered package that provides long-term benefits,” said Bester.
Waste water management has become one of the major challenges that most countries face due to the scarcity of water resources. By installing Packaged Water Treatment plant mining projects and workers can have access to purified water even though they might be working in the remote area.
