The Dow Chemical Co. announced the alignment of its mineral extraction and processing technologies with its portfolio of technology offerings for oil and gas. The announcement was made at Investing in African Mining Indaba 2013, the world’s largest investment conference for stakeholders in the mining industry, hosted annually in Cape Town, South Africa. Dow Oil & Gas will now operate as Dow Oil, Gas & Mining under the global leadership of Larry Ryan, business director.
“This move allows us to further enhance the value we can bring to customers in natural resource extraction by unifying and strengthening our portfolio of solutions,” said Ryan. “It also brings our market-driven business strategy to bear on the mining industry, fostering more touch points with the persons, organizations and companies that are deeply entrenched in the industry and can provide valuable insight as we seek and identify opportunities to apply our chemistries and technologies to areas of ongoing and unmet market needs.”
Recent Dow innovations in oil and gas include solutions for the recovery of natural gas from shale and subsea oil from deeper ocean depths. In mining, Dow is known for using ion exchange resins for uranium extraction and continues to be an innovator and supplier of this technology, with ongoing advances in both resin-in-solution and resin-in-pulp systems. Dow is also a provider of froth flotation technology for mineral extraction and offers additional chemistry and process solutions for comminution, flotation and mineral mining, as well as for special applications like dust management, pulp transport and corrosion protection for transport equipment.
Dow is also the world’s largest manufacturer of reverse osmosis (RO) membranes and ion exchange resins for water and wastewater treatment, as well as a leading provider of ultrafiltration (UF) membranes. Many of these technologies have applications in mining, not only for extraction as in uranium production, but also more universally for water and wastewater management. For example, Dow UF membranes work in combination with RO membranes to offer mine operators an effective alternative to traditional sand filtration for effluent treatment.
“Mining is ranked as the second largest industrial user of water globally, making management solutions critical to sustainable operation,” said Paul-Michael Pellny, strategic marketing manager, industrial processes, Dow Water & Process Solutions. Dow operates water processing R&D centers in the United States, China, Spain, Brazil, Germany and Saudi Arabia.
Source: Dow Oil, Gas & Mining
