The Technology Access Centre for Sustainable Mining (TACSM), a part of the Centre for Energy and Environmental Sustainability, is committed to advancing sustainability across Canada’s mining industry, encompassing oil sands, critical minerals, and water/tailings management. TACSM delivers applied research services across three technical pillars as well as knowledge to practice offerings which align to our services.
Technical Pillars
Learn more about Technology Access Centres across Canada.
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We assist companies in better understanding their mineral resources and optimizing methods for recovering them (geometallurgy). We also support innovation in core scanning technologies, identifying value from waste streams and researching improvements to mineral processing unit operations.
We assist partners in understanding water quality and develop treatment solutions to meet quality standards. For internal process streams, our research involves understanding the impact of water quality on key mineral processing and tailings treatment unit operations, enabling companies to evaluate and enhance water recycling technologies on-site. For water discharged off-site into the environment, we study the ongoing water quality and the environmental impacts on surrounding ecosystems.
We help develop and evaluate tailings dewatering technologies, while also investigating the long-term geotechnical and geochemical impacts of additives used in product recovery, water management, or dewatering processes. A key strength is our ability to integrate our ore characterization expertise with process knowledge to predict tailings behaviour as early as the core investigation phase. This capability is vital as stringent regulatory requirements encourage )operators to make tailings planning decisions earlier in the development process, often when limited samples preclude traditional geotechnical testing.
Canada’s mining and energy industries face complex challenges requiring innovative solutions and continuous professional development. We leverage our expertise in Canada’s commodity sectors and understanding of regional technological trends to deliver training relevant to our industry partners. We continue to create significant impact in knowledge mobilization by:
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