Rockburst and Tersa: Pioneering Sustainable Mining Innovations
Mining has long navigated a delicate balance between established technologies and emerging innovation.
Like any industry, resource extraction must weigh costs against output. Although the sector has always contended with rigorous permitting and oversight, environmental standards have grown significantly stricter over recent decades.
These regulatory frameworks often result in longer timelines, higher expenses, and increased pressure on project viability. Yet they have also driven innovation, cutting overhead costs and boosting yields..
At this year’s Web Summit, held in Vancouver from May 11 to 14, a number of new technologies were featured to decarbonize the industry and reduce long-term waste.
Breaking rocks
Among the new innovations featured was Vancouver-based Rockburst Technologies.
The company tackles an early stage of the mining process, reducing the mined rock to a consistent size for use in the concentration process.
To this end, the company has focused on developing its CoreBurst technology, which fundamentally changes how the comminution process is carried out.
Typically, mined ore is usually crushed and milled, that is to say, it is pushed or ground down. Rockburst suggests that these compression techniques are inefficient and that mineral structure is more resistant to this type of liberation.
Instead, the Rockburst uses a process called transcritical CO2 pulverization that injects CO2 into the ore at high pressure, and when pressure is released, it breaks the rocks from the inside.
The company states that the process is more efficient and uses 50 percent less energy than traditional methods. Additionally, the rocks themselves become carbon sinks, trapping the CO2 used.
During the “Global Scale: The BC Hub for Next-Gen Resource and Energy Tech” panel, Rockburst CEO Oscal Malpica said that creating new mining technology can be an uphill battle, and it starts with funding.
He explained that you need to validate the concept before asking for money.
“When you’re in hard tech, your prototypes, or at least in my case, my prototype is a three-meter-tall massive machine… but just to build that thing, it takes C$2 million,” he said.
Malpica went on to note that while it is designed to tackle challenges at the heart of the mining industry, it can still be difficult to change minds and adopt new innovations, even when they align with core environmental principles.
The shift from physical to thermodynamic means of breaking down ore has raised safety issues, with some suggesting the process is too dangerous. Part of the problem is that the process is still new; there are no regulations governing its implementation and safe application. Malpica is aware that it’s something they’ll have to deal with over the next three years.
“The mining industry is a very conservative, very traditional industry, very hard to break into. For us, what works is coming to the lab to see what…
