P&Q Profile: Precision Blasting Services’ Anthony Konya

Is there currently a shortage of blasters out there, and has a lack of education potentially contributed to this over the years?

I definitely think there’s a shortage out there. That’s due to multiple reasons. We see the average age of the blasters constantly increasing. This has been a problem for at least the last decade, but an issue that’s been noticed for the last several decades.

What we’re going to have to see eventually is young, new blasters coming into the arena. At some point, we’re going to have to fill these gaps because we have to have blasting. We’re not going to be getting rid of blasters or blasting anytime soon.

When we’re bringing in new blasters, there’s going to be a huge education gap. A lot of sites are using the same blaster who’s been blasting that rock for 20 or 30 years. That blaster knows that site really well, but when someone new comes in they’re going to have to make their own decisions. They’re going to have to come up with processes.

So, I think the educational requirement and need is going to increase as we see younger people coming into the blasting industry, being out on the bench and having to make decisions and develop processes.

What’s most exciting to you right now when you think about blasting technology that’s coming to the forefront of the industry?

There is a lot of great innovation coming out now. We’re seeing drones and artificial intelligence being incorporated. We’re seeing autonomous systems. We’re seeing new control systems coming out on bulk trucks. But probably the technology that’s gotten me most excited right now are some of the new developments in emulsion and emulsion manufacturing.

In our company, we build emulsion plants and develop and manufacture different types of emulsion explosives. We’ve developed these plants all over the world. One of the new things we’re seeing is a better, more stable, higher-energy emulsion. The simplest way I can break this down is the major energy component in emulsion is the ammonium nitrate. Now, there are other components in there like water. Water just takes energy away from that emulsion.

Across the board, we’ve traditionally seen a set amount of ammonium nitrate in those emulsion products. That’s because when we’re normally designing an emulsion, we sort of play a balancing act. We can have high ammonium nitrate but low stability and shelf life, or we can have lower ammonium nitrate with high stability and shelf life.

Now, the biggest innovation that I think we’re seeing right now is, by new manufacturing techniques that we’ve started to employ, we can get the high ammonium nitrate content, which produces about 20 percent more energy than the traditional emulsions people are using today – and we can get extremely stable emulsions. They’re very insensitive, and we’re seeing a three- to five-year or longer shelf life from these emulsions.

It has a lot to do with the design [and] the manufacturing processes. But that’s something I see as sort of the next big step in this industry. Because with that increase in explosives, emulsions become much more cost-effective for a wide variety of applications. I think that’s going to be the next immediate and two-, three-year step we’re going to see in the explosives industry itself.

Are we seeing practical application of these new explosives on a widespread level right now?

We’re seeing it almost every day. We have plants over in Europe that are running and developing this product, and [we’re] shipping it out every single day to the mine sites out there.

The last plant we set up was in Mongolia. We’ve set up other plants on five different continents so far. We’re seeing [it] rapidly being applied. People are really enjoying the product. They’re very excited about it because, at the end of the day, they get to reduce their drilling and blasting costs, paying pretty much the same amount per pound but getting that 20 percent increase in energy.

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