The Globe and Mail

Brad Marchant had barely caught his breath after flying home to Vancouver from meeting with customers in the United States and Mexico when he found himself accepting an award for the innovative work of his company, BioteQ Environmental Technologies Inc.

The company won an industry award for export performance from the not-for-profit Globe Foundation, a private business organization that issued a half-dozen Awards for Environmental Excellence at the close of its Globe 2008 conference and trade fair last week in Vancouver.

BioteQ was honoured for the water-treatment plants it designs and operates at mines around the world, using a proprietary system that removes acid and heavy metals from runoff water leeching from mine sites - a major environmental headache for mining companies for decades.

"Although the word 'sustainable' is probably overused, it is our objective to produce for the mining customer a true sustainable answer to acid-water drainage," says Mr. Marchant, BioteQ's president.

"It has to be sustainable environmentally and economically, and we think we do that."

In the BioteQ system, a mixture of sulphur-loving bacteria neutralizes the acid in the water, leaving behind the heavy metals that come away in the mining process, such as copper, zinc, nickel, cobalt and selenium. These metals can then be sold on the market.

As an extra bonus, the previously poisoned water ends up clean and safe enough for use in industrial and agricultural projects, a plus for companies working in an increasingly water-short world.

Nancy Wright, vice-president of the Vancouver-based Globe Foundation, says BioteQ took home the award for export performance because the foundation's voters believed the company's efforts to succeed on the world stage to be "a really big deal."

"BioteQ been very successful at translating a virtually new technology into commercial production relatively quickly," she says. "In the last three years they've come up by leaps and bounds ... This year they really stood out."

Currently, the method most mining companies still use to stop acid water from leeching into the ecosystem involves catching the tainted water with lime, resulting in a toxic sludge that must be carefully stored. The expense is considerable - as is the waste, notes Mr. Marchant.

He estimates that about 70 per cent of mines around the world face this problem, all potential BioteQ customers.

Mr. Marchant, 51, started his company after leaving B.C.-based gold mining company Placer Dome Inc., for whom he had set up water treatments at new mine sites. BioteQ first began exploring the biochemical potential of cleaning up acid runoff in 1988, and patented the technology in 1996. Now it has four plants operating in the United States and Canada and five more under construction internationally.

The firm has just over 50 employees, with 15 at the Vancouver head office and the remainder at the BioteQ treatment plants. With rising orders for its technology from companies in China, Chile, Australia and India, it is on track for rapid expansion. BioteQ reported revenues of $4.6-million for 2007, and investment of $11.1-million in new plants.

The company not only designs and builds but also staffs the plant facilities at the mines. With his firm taking care of the water cleanup, the mining companies can focus on the business of mining, knowing they are in compliance with international environmental laws on toxic water effluence, Mr. Marchant says.

"It's good business for us and great for the mining companies," he says.

"[The companies] outsource the whole water-treatment issue to us, we manage the water, we build the plant and run it, and generally we create a financially sustainable treatment process, in that the sale of metals from the process sustains the treatment plant ..."

The amount of cleaned water runs to billions of litres. For example, BioTeq cleaned 920 million litres of acid-waste water from Xstrata's Raglan nickel-copper mine in northern Quebec last year. Mr. Marchant says the processed water was safe enough to be used in the sensitive arctic ecosystem of Nunavik - something unthinkable in the past.

At the Bisbee copper mine, run by Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. in Arizona, the amount of water cleaned by the BioteQ process in 2007 amounted to a whopping 2.8 billion litres.

Ms. Wright says BioteQ's innovative technologies "hold great promise," and foreign mining companies can see this. She says one of the key criteria for the award was a company's success in breaking into new world markets and maintaining exports in a range of markets: "BioteQ has demonstrated that they are doing that successfully and that they are making quite a large difference in the mining sector."

BioteQ is now investing time and money on future growth and developing new uses for its acid-eating micro-organisms. The technology is already being applied to clean up sulphates, industrial and agricultural salts that can damage the environment.

"This year is really going to be interesting as we will be bringing our new plants online," Mr. Marchant says. "We are on track to commission a new plant every quarter, so it is quite exciting to work here."

Environmental stewards

The annual Globe Awards for Environmental Excellence are presented by the Vancouver-based Globe Foundation and recognize outstanding achievement in environmental stewardship. Here is the list of 2008 winners, announced last Thursday at the foundation's Globe 2008 conference in Vancouver:

EnCana Corp., Calgary: Corporate award for environmental excellence

Novex Delivery Solutions, Vancouver: ecoFreight transportation award

Nexterra Energy Corp., Vancouver: Technology innovation and application award

BioteQ Environmental Technologies Inc., Vancouver: Export performance award

Ethical Funds Company, Vancouver; Award for sustainable investment and banking

Dockside Green project, Victoria: Excellence in urban sustainability award.

Source: Globe Foundation