Leading mine blasting solutions provider BME has announced a new alignment with Protea Mining Chemicals, which provides one point of contact for two solutions through the BME brand.

In this regard, Engineering News & Mining Weekly put these questions to Ralf Hennecke, the MD of BME, an Omnia group company.

In what respects will the alignment of BME and Protea Mining Chemicals offer a more comprehensive value proposition to global customers?

Firstly, the global mining trend, as we need to acknowledge, is really going into more outsourcing of services, like explosives, drilling, chemicals and so forth and the mining industry in general is relying quite heavily on contractors to transfer skills and knowledge to themselves and to the rest of the industry. So, the alignment between explosives and the chemicals business plays directly into the hands of what we are trying to achieve. This solution offering will contribute greatly to the mining value chain, with the one being a rock-breaking solution, and the other being a minerals processing and minerals liberation solution. Ultimately, those two practices are a little bit intertwined. If we think about blast results and leading up to mineral liberation processes, the better you blast, the easier it is to liberate the mineral at the end of the day, or the easier it is to push the product, or the blasted material, through to the plant. This is not only a change in value proposition for the mining industry in general. It is a value proposition for our own people as well, and it is leading to being an employer of choice, because now the explosives engineers are learning about chemical processing, and the metallurgists are learning a little bit about blasting rock, and how those things are intertwined, so it really helps our company to become an employer of choice.

What safety protocols are paramount when BME Blasting Solutions provides customers with explosives and detonator offerings?

As we all know, safety is paramount, and is a ticket to the game today. It falls squarely into the ESG drive in our industry as well. We offer solutions for the entire product base now, the cost of ownership of our products, and living the life cycle of our products from not only blasting, but also liberalisation of the mineral at the end of the day. Safety in itself talks to the basics. Today, you cannot live as a miner or as a contractor in our ESG environment without doing the basics right. Safety falls squarely into that. Supply chain security, quality of products, processes, trust in people, application protocols and in all of those stages and in all of those characteristics that you need to offer the mining industry today, you need to be safe, not only in your own practices and what you’re good at, but in today’s mining game, you need to be the eyes and ears of your customers and give advice to their own operations and live in that ecosystem of mining production in general.

What hallmarks will BME Metallurgy uphold when it goes about providing mining chemicals and metallurgical solutions to the world?

First of all, having the metallurgists and specialists on the mine who understand the products, who understand the processes, and, most importantly, understand the customer needs. We have fit-for-purpose solutions for the mines. Just to give you an example, we offer chemical products to the mining industry at specific chemical concentrations that are optimised for their processing results or for their geology and their rock in order to liberate the minerals. You get different concentrations of products, and only by living on the mine and living in the space of the customer, can you understand and tweak what the customer ultimately would like to achieve. But we take the whole chemical side and explosive side one step further. Specifically on the chemical side, what we offer the customer is safety solutions from a handling, storage and chemical application perspective, but also offer supply chain solutions to procurement, transport, handling and storage of chemicals and explosives, and ultimately offer application solutions for both explosives and chemicals at the same time.

In what respects does the alignment of BME and Protea Mining Chemicals provide BME with the opportunity to refresh its brand?

Our brand is very, very strong globally in BME. Everyone knows BME as an explosives provider and a lot of people ask us what the BME acronym stands for. In the new brand, it will stand for nothing but BME. Now you can have your own ideas. BME could stand for beyond mining explosives. It could stand for the old bulk mining explosives. It could stand today for beyond mineral extraction, which points to the chemical side of the business. But we said we’re going to have one solution to a common customer base with one brand, and that brand is going to be BME and a refresh will simplify the business per se for our industry and for our customers that seek explosives and chemicals, if it is properly communicated. We are going through that marketing communication process over the next couple of months to make sure that our customers and our macro environment understand what BME actually and ultimately stands for.

Tell us about the innovation that BME has introduced in recent years and the growth trajectory it has experienced.

There’s so much going on in our space that we’re proud of. We’ve got tailor-made solutions that talk to some form of innovation on its own. If you can provide a solution from a mineral liberation and also a rock-breaking perspective that is tailor made for the customer and what they actually want to achieve, and you are successful, that in itself is talking to some form of innovation. But if we take that to the next level, we’re doing product development, we’re doing digitisation development. The mining industry calls it modernisation. We’re playing in the autonomy, automation, digitisation space. The outcome of all of that is ultimately to produce optimised blasts and optimal mineral liberation. If you take our products, for instance, our emulsion has been tweaked to give off into the atmosphere the least noxious fumes and carbon emissions. At the same time, we’re using a used oil formulation, which takes away the used and waste oil from the mining industry and we repurpose that used oil into our formulations. That talks to some form of circular economy that we provide. We’ve got electronic detonators that are the most accurate, safe and user-friendly detonator system in the world. Why I’m telling you all of this is because it contributes to blast optimisation. What the mines are after today is building digitisation programmes that talk to real-time reporting, data storage, data collection, data analysis, trend analysis, which, if done correctly, all lead to predictability in outcome and in blasting. That’s what we are specialising in, and through optimised blasting, you take the right product through the mill at massive savings. Most of all, if you do all of this correctly, the ESG benefit on its own and the outcome in less carbon emissions is invaluable to the industry today. We are also partnering with Hypex Bio to bring a new and groundbreaking explosive formulation that will almost revolutionalise the carbon emissions and the way of blasting on a global basis. But we’re still working on how we are going to bring that to market in all the various territories in which we operate currently.

BME is a key member of the Omnia Group, which is a prominent member of South Africa’s highly regarded Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Why does Omnia favour this rebrand?

Firstly, both BME and Omnia are playing in the mining space. Omnia’s purpose stands for innovating to enhance life, together creating a greener future. Omnia works with fertiliser, food security and liberating minerals. Omnia, in the Protea Mining Chemicals space, works with water purification and so forth. From a mineral liberation perspective, we both feel proud that we add to urbanisation, add to building hospitals, and add to having medical equipment developed through the minerals that we liberate. Omnia, as a group, acknowledges that, and it acknowledges that we are playing a more important role in achieving their value statement. But it’s also about diversification. The agriculture space on its own lives in a very cyclical space, which goes through drought, El Niño and wet weather, and the weather’s never right. The mining sector is a lot less cyclical but at the same time the feedstock through the fertiliser business and the mining industry and ammonium nitrates and so forth is the same. So, from a cyclicality perspective, it’s a great value proposition for the group to grow the mining space a little bit more. The Omnia group feels that the mining space, from an ESG perspective, has so much more to offer, that we are currently enjoying all the support from the group to achieve what we want to achieve in the mining space.