Challenges
While the world needs potash to feed the growing population, inflationary impacts, societal expectations, and trade volatility are creating challenges for potash operators in the new millennium. Heightened ESG expectations, technology obsolescence, climate change, supply chain disruption, growing regulatory demand, evolving workforce competencies, and expectation of short-term market responsive production rates, are variables businesses are spending more time managing than ever before. Having access to information and knowing what business practices to focus improvements on is growing more complex with competing objectives that often come with an upside and downside trade-off. Operators are expected to systematically explore the trade-offs, extract greater value from assets, minimize operating cost, and create improved business practices that lead to predictable, clean, and safe production if they are to maintain shareholder and community confidence. Established producers are searching for business practices that help manage their risk, generate new operational efficiencies, produce real-time meaningful insights to aid decision making, and improve their market access. Continuous improvement and modernization are essential. Drawing on the knowledge of potash mining and processing experts continues to be important, but operators are also looking to adjacent industries for inspiration. Those willing to challenge past practices are applying innovative solutions that generate predictable sustained performance, combat inflation, trim operating costs, and reduce the need for new capital expenditures.
New entrants are facing their own unique challenges in addition to those of established producers. High initial capital outlay, financing pressures, workforce availability, and an unpredictable supply chain are among the barriers to overcome. While new entrants can bring the latest solutions to their operation, they also carry the risk associated with the integration of technology and solutions that have not yet been proven over the long term. They'll need the right combination of expertise to navigate the benefits and disadvantages that come with greenfield development and the advantages modern technology can give them. Credible, purposeful future-proofed process designs that optimize the business practices to respond to the market while maintaining low-cost high-quality production will be key.
Capabilities
For the last 20 years, Hatch has been engaged with companies around the world to provide engineering consulting services and support to MOP and SOP producing companies and operations. The work covered the mining, processing, non-process infrastructure and logistics and level of work has included scoping studies, pre-feasibility studies, feasibility studies, construction management, start-up and commissioning, ramp-up, operation / debottlenecking and expansions and sustaining capital projects. This level of involvement and the depth and scope of the work has made Hatch the pre-eminent provider of engineering consulting services in the potassium salt space.
Mining, hoisting systems, ventilation and logistics
Our clients have something in common besides potash: their business demands that they streamline their processes at every opportunity to maximize capacity. With Hatch, real world experience meets deep technical understanding and modern tools to stretch mine services, bring creative solutions that keep miners cutting, and maintain bin levels to get the most out of the world’s highest-producing hoisting systems. We understand potash ventilation and help our clients optimize their ventilation circuits to efficiently move air around their mines. We have successfully designed some of the world’s largest hoisting systems and headframes for the Saskatchewan potash market.
Solution mining, crystallization and brine ponds
Processing brine from potash solution mining and shallow brine-extraction wells is a core capability of ours. We're specialists in well-field development and pumping systems. We couple these with downstream processing in solar evaporation ponds, cooling crystallization ponds, or mechanical evaporation and crystallization plants.
Potash compaction plants
Potash producers must meet increasingly tight product-quality requirements. At the same time, they're working to improve plant efficiencies and conversion rates. Experience designing and building compaction plants has given us the skills to deliver process consulting services, optimization, feasibility studies, technology evaluation, equipment selection, specialized equipment design, modeling, and full EPCM services for potash compaction plants.
Potash market studies and due diligence
We partner with both investment and commercial banks, equity funds, bondholders, attorneys, and operating companies. Together, we provide our clients with thorough due diligence assessments – financial, operational, technological, environmental, market, and commercial. Our technical reviews and global surveys help clients evaluate potash assets before they acquire them.
Process modeling, debottlenecking, and optimization
Start with process and engineering know-how. Add modeling and simulation expertise. The result? Cost-efficient, robust designs. We use advanced computational tools for capacity planning, debottlenecking, rail-and-port logistics, and process simulation, and optimization. Design capability, capital effectiveness, and operational efficiency all follow.
Technology Deployment
Our organization brings a suite of people with deep knowledge of existing, new, and emerging technologies across multiple industries. When we overlay our potash knowledge with our technology expertise, we can help you understand how (and if) the technologies produce bottom line results, the cost to deploy them, and what is needed to manage the technology downstream in our clients’ operations in terms of safety, maintenance, organizational change management, and workforce competency. While we are energized by new technologies, we also understand that ‘just because we can, does not mean we should’.
Operational performance, commissioning and ramp-up
Our local teams blend process, mining, and hoisting expertise, operational understanding, and project delivery excellence through their backgrounds in both project delivery as well as real world potash operations. They work side-by-side with our clients to achieve measurable results. We're capable and experienced in operational readiness; asset and structural integrity management; maintenance support; operational improvement; sustaining projects; engineering services; and shutdown services. We have dedicated teams of experts that help our clients commission their new facilities and bring a disciplined approach to ensuring that ramp-up volumes and timelines are met.