Can you give an overview of Bureau Veritas and how the company serves the local mining industry?

Bureau Veritas is a leading global provider of geochemistry, mineral processing, and environmental services to the exploration and mining community. We support companies throughout the mining value chain: Exploration, extraction, processing and transportation. Our services are structured to support the life cycle of your assets, from planning and design through procurement of components and equipment to construction, operation and closure. Through our green line of services & solutions, we can also help demonstrate the impact of your ESG actions by making them traceable, visible and reliable to support your sustainability objectives.

I joined Bureau Veritas in 2008 as part of the Australian minerals testing business. From this time, the company continued to invest in the commodities space acquiring a range of businesses, including the Canadian-based Acme Analytical Laboratories, creating a global network to service our customers.

As a global group, Bureau Veritas has had the benefit of a network with technical centers that offer genuine points of difference and expertise to support resource development.  We are taking learnings from across our network to offer the best solutions to our mining customers in Canada to help them be smarter and more agile.

Can you highlight a case study where Bureau Veritas supported a mining client in Canada?

The mining industry is focused on doing things smarter with a focus on CSR. Bureau Veritas has successfully developed an onsite lab service offering for battery minerals that significantly reduces the total cost of ownership while also enabling the customer to reduce their carbon footprint, remove the use of acids on site, and support the mine to have a cleaner and less labor-intensive process. We have successfully offered this service in Australia for several years and will be commissioning our first site in central Canada.

What other trends have you noticed in the mining industry in recent years, and how have they reflected on the demand for Bureau Veritas’ services?

In light of the energy transition and increased demand for battery minerals, we have seen a change in terms of what customers require. Bureau Veritas will always move with the market, and today offers a range of new analytical services to support critical minerals. While our traditional services have focused on the elemental nature of a resource, we have developed a new spectral solution. This innovation involves harnessing the power of infrared spectroscopy to support the analysis and evaluation of ore bodies and process performance using a spectral fingerprint of a resource to understand a range of critical characteristics, predicting metallurgical parameters, mineralogical characteristics, chemistry, and physical properties. By harnessing these predictive insights, mining companies can make informed decisions and optimize their operations for greater efficiency and profitability.

How has the growing importance of ESG impacted demand for Bureau Veritas’ services?

There is a realization in the mining industry that there is a need to change and adopt new technologies to do things in a more effective and environmentally friendly way. Over the next year, Bureau Veritas will be releasing a novel solution for low-level gold analysis that addresses the hazardous waste generated in the testing process.  This provides a detection limit that enables the required granularity for your resource data set while also removing the traditional waste streams of the testing, and substantially reducing the carbon footprint associated with obtaining the data.

What advice do you have for mining companies when it comes to exploration, development, and mine closure?

People are often comfortable with the status quo and using techniques they know, but things are changing rapidly in our industry. I would encourage mining companies to engage in conversation with companies like Bureau Veritas to see how they can generate and use the data more effectively; they may be surprised by the advancements that have been made in this space.

What are Bureau Veritas’ key priorities for the next year?

From an innovation pipeline perspective, Bureau Veritas has several services that are about to be commercialized that will help make a difference for our customers in terms of how they approach their resources and what they can achieve with them. We are excited to soon bring these services to market and help our customers improve their operations.