Xylem and Evoqua have combined to create an enlarged water technology company set to deliver significant benefits to the Australian resources industry.
Last year saw Xylem acquire a leader in industrial water treatment solutions and services, bolstering the company’s offerings across the water cycle.
The addition of Evoqua Water Technologies expands Xylem’s technology platform, with new products and domain expertise capable of delivering end-to-end solutions that tackle the world’s most pressing water challenges.
In Australia and New Zealand alone, Xylem and Evoqua work in 13 locations and employ about 350 staff serving a variety of markets, including local councils, the industrial sector, the mining industry, agriculture, commercial business services, and residential communities.
According to Jorge Amezquita, Evoqua national sales manager – Australia and New Zealand, Evoqua can solve problems in three integral water areas.
“On a mine site, you have drinking water for the camp site and you have process water and wastewater, which involves the wastewater itself and the solids you need to remove,” Amezquita told Australian Mining.
“In those areas, we have filtration and disinfection technologies that play an important role, with these treatment offerings complementing Xylem’s renowned pumping infrastructure and technologies.
“If bore water is your starting point and you pump water from point A to point B, treatment processes are required in-between. Our technology and in-house process experts in Australia can help in these areas.”
Some of Evoqua’s key technologies include its on-site hypochlorite generation systems (OSEC), which safely generates sodium hypochlorite on-demand, using only salt, water and power. The OSEC serves as a critical solution to many disinfection conundrums in the mining sector.
Evoqua’s Wallace & Tiernan brand – an esteemed portfolio of gas chlorination, disinfection and chemical dosing systems – already has a strong presence in the mining industry, with several Tier-1 miners implementing these products to solve their disinfection challenges.
Image: Xylem
Another established offering is Evoqua’s range of chlorine dioxide generation systems.
“Manufactured in Germany, Evoqua’s chlorine dioxide systems have been part of the company for a long time,” Evoqua business development manager – industrial Brett Creagh told Australian Mining.
“These systems produce a strong oxidant for disinfection purposes. Mining companies can use chlorine dioxide to control algae growth, which can clog their systems and create costly process failures and downtime.
“Our VAF screen filtration systems – a range of automatic self-cleaning screen filters that support the removal of suspended solids from 10 to 1500 microns in size – eliminate the need for replaceable cartridge filters, while our reverse osmosis (RO) systems are also an important part of the filtration puzzle.”
Creagh also highlighted Evoqua’s Ionpure water purification range, which is a downstream offering from RO used to create ‘ultrapure water’, a form of water purity key to many processes on a mine site.
“A coal mine would have a power station where steam is generated to produce electricity,” Creagh said. “That steam can’t come from dirty water as it will destroy the turbines. This is where ultrapure water plays an important role.”
It’s one thing, according to Creagh, to provide a portfolio of products to support water applications in the mining industry, but it’s another to provide them to a high level.
“We don’t expect to run into many problems with our products, as we’ve been refining and evolving these offerings for decades,” he said.
“We have an application engineering team, a sales team and service technicians who have been with us for 20-plus years. This year we’ll be focused on visiting sites with our Xylem colleagues, talking to the mines and showcasing the Evoqua products.
“It’s just as important for us to promote our products as it is for us to understand the unique water challenges miners are currently facing, and with Xylem’s widespread presence and relationships in the Australian mining industry, we are hoping to reach new customers and mining regions.”
Image: Xylem
Creagh underlines the importance of having “boots on the ground”.
“Xylem has an office in Mount Isa (in the Gulf Country region of Queensland) that looks after that specific mining sector,” he said. “Evoqua can leverage not only a team of Xylem technicians who know Mount Isa intimately, but also tap into Xylem’s relationships and stakeholders in this region.
“This will help us build awareness, and once we have the ear of the end user, we will be able to display our solutions, show value and demonstrate the return on investment for the customer and start to see our exposure grow.”
Evoqua aims to have an immediate impact, with the company working towards one- and three-year goals to accompany its medium- and long-term aspirations in the Australian mining industry.
What starts with building awareness of Evoqua products and services has even greater potential once customers see the benefits of Xylem and Evoqua’s vertical integration, where the enlarged water technology company can not only deliver the pumping infrastructure critical to dewatering and other process applications, but also the treatment offerings that transport this water safely and cleanly.
“Being able to deliver an end-to-end solution is something we see as a huge benefit for the end user, as they’ll be able to go through the different steps of the process with us,” Amezquita said.
“When we talk about disinfection, we have the electric chlorination system, but maybe the customer prefers to use chlorine gas as it might be a better fit for the process, the site, or the conditions of the customer.
“This is how I perceive an end-to-end solution. We ask the customer, ‘What’s your problem?’, and it might be water quality. Then we can not only consider the water quality of the filtration, but we can take a step back, have a look at the water source and complete a process review.”
Amezquita said process engineers could be deployed to site to review customer challenges and provide recommendations before a tailored solution is developed that harnesses the vertically integrated pumping and treatment portfolios of Evoqua and Xylem.
The partnership appears to be a match made in heaven, with Evoqua and Xylem not only able to leverage their unique ideas and offerings to support the continued evolution of global water management but also deliver solutions that can solve the mining industry’s most pressing water challenges.
This feature appeared in the March 2024 issue of Australian Mining.