BQE Water–Hudbay SART plant in Canada: process and design notes for mill engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on International Mining – News
30 Second Briefing
BQE Water has signed a contract with Hudbay Minerals to advance engineering of a SART (sulphidisation, acidification, recycling and thickening) plant to IFC stage for integration into Hudbay’s Snow Lake mill in Manitoba, marking the first SART installation in Canada. The plant will treat metallurgical bleed streams and cyanide-bearing mine water, enabling cyanide recovery and copper sulphide precipitation rather than conventional lime neutralisation. For operators, this signals growing interest in reagent recovery and metal by-product capture as part of mill flowsheet design in cold-climate Canadian operations.
Technical Brief
- Contract scope is to progress SART engineering to full Issued-for-Construction (IFC) design package.
Our Take
Hudbay’s Snow Lake operations in Manitoba sit in a mature VMS mining camp with legacy water quality issues, so being the first in Canada to adopt a SART plant signals a move to retrofit older base metal districts with more sophisticated water and cyanide management rather than only applying these systems at new builds.
BQE Water appears only sporadically in our mining project coverage compared with larger EPCMs, so this contract at Snow Lake could help it position as a niche process specialist for complex water treatment and metal recovery at Canadian sites facing tighter sustainability expectations.
Among sustainability‑tagged mining pieces in our database, Canada features heavily for tailings and water stewardship, and the Snow Lake SART installation will likely be watched by other Manitoba and broader Canadian operators as a test case for integrating reagent recovery into existing mill circuits.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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