In the second part of the interview with Chemours (Link to Part 2 here), our CEO, Benedikt Kirchgaessler, and Jackson Briggs, Marketing Manager for Mining Solutions at Chemours, dived into the topic of how CyanoGuard's solution helps mines with their compliance, reporting and environmental protection efforts.
Here are some key takeaways from the second part of the interview.
Your technology is a plug-and-play solution that requires no calibration. Can you elaborate on the key benefits compared to traditional methods?
One of the advantages of our solution is that everything is fully standardized. The plug-and-play part is a result of everything being fully standardized. You just need to press your sample through the cartridge, the cartridge changes color, the device reads out the color change and then translates this into a cyanide value. It usually takes no more than 4-5 days for mines to have everything they need to start onsite and about 15-20 minutes per operator to get acquainted with the device.
Because everything is standardized, mines can use the data pool and results to benchmark different mines. And you can take learnings not only from one site, but from several sites.
For mines that have an issue of cyanide control, or want to improve their cyanide control, we are also offering a very short-term, non-committal trial period where mines can just try it out and see whether it brings value or not. So, there's no large scale investments necessary and mines can use it along side with what they have currently.
How does your solution reduce the potential environmental impact of metal mining?
Cyanide is hard to measure because of all the interferences with existing methods. Cyanide monitoring in metal mining and gold mining, in particular, is a process that is hard to optimize as existing tools do not offer the necessary capabilities.
For example, with heap leaching or when monitoring a polishing pond, mines need to make sure that there's no more cyanide. And if there would be any cyanide you need to react very fast. There have been incidents in the past where the severity of the incident was mainly caused by the time it took to identify and the incidents or sources of spilling. With our solution, an operator can make a test on the spot immediately, alert appropriate managers within the organization and take actions to mitigate the issue.
Are there any features you're looking at adding in the near term?
Something that we've already been working on for quite some time, is our WAD test. And that's particularly helpful for mines on the environmental side of things, because WAD is even more difficult than the regular free-cyanide test that we're already offering. You need to liberate the cyanide. And this usually takes a couple of hours.
We are also looking at how to automate our solution even further. In some cases, it will be very helpful if you could minimize the operator input even more. So it will be the same system that we currently have with the cartridge, but with no operator. And on the software side, we will add even more smart, intelligent, and analytic features to our existing cloud platform. For instance, predictive analytics and automated process control capabilities, where the process controls automatically adjust the cyanide feed based on the cyanide levels measured.
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