Workshop Report: Water In Mineral Processing
Water management is one of the most pressing challenges in mineral processing today. Mining operations worldwide are increasingly required to deliver higher productivity while simultaneously addressing water scarcity, quality concerns, social expectations, and regulatory constraints. These challenges are particularly acute in regions such as Latin America, where water demand intersects with diverse environmental and community contexts.
CEEC International, through its Global Water Initiative (GWI), has positioned water as a critical dimension of eco-efficiency in mining, alongside energy, emissions, and tailings. The initiative builds on CEEC’s track record of collaborative knowledge sharing, exemplified by the Energy Curves program, and seeks to provide a practical framework for innovation, benchmarking, and adoption of better water practices across the industry.
In this context, CEEC convened a technical workshop in Santiago, Chile, in early August 2025, held in parallel with the Procemin-Geomet conference. The workshop brought together experts from mining companies, technology providers, research institutions, and consultants to collectively explore water challenges and opportunities along the mineral processing flowsheet.
The objectives of the workshop were to:
- Map and categorise key water-related issues across grinding, flotation, thickening, filtration, tailings, and concentrate handling.
- Generate solution pathways at different time horizons: immediate improvements, brownfield infrastructure upgrades, and longer-term structural or technological shifts.
- Apply a backcasting approach to envision a future state of mineral processing with significantly reduced water footprint and to identify the steps required to reach it.
- Strengthen connections between industry, research, and technology stakeholders, ensuring that findings contribute to CEEC’s Global Water Initiative and to broader industry dialogue.
By structuring the discussions around specific stages of the flowsheet and using a predefined catalogue of issues, the workshop enabled participants to move quickly from identifying challenges to proposing actionable and forward-looking solutions. The following sections describe the methodology, findings of each working group, and strategic insights derived from this collective effort.
Readers should note that the workshop was convened in a context of primarily copper processing, in a water scarcity and competition for use enviroment. A different set of challenges exist in water-rich regions, but that conversation is reserved for a subsequent workshop