P&Q Profile: Precision Blasting Services’ Anthony Konya

You also believe ‘green’ explosives will become more prevalent in the years to come. What exactly are green explosives, and when might we see them become somewhat mainstream?

This area of green explosives is a really exciting sort of space. We’ve seen it in other areas of explosives like in the military or the propellant industry. But the civil commercial marketplace has sort of been lagging behind a bit. It’s not for lack of effort; it’s because we make very good explosives at a very low cost, and it’s difficult to replicate that by making some of these major changes.

Green explosives are an explosive formulated to produce no toxic gases of a certain type. This is one of the areas that the green explosives market is trying to figure out right now. The market has not established yet. It’s a new technology that’s coming up.

On one end of the board, you have your typical green initiatives, which is reduction of carbon – the reduction of CO2 and CO. Now, that’s one perspective. But in the civil explosives industry, we have sort of a different viewpoint because our most toxic gas and most dangerous gas we can create for employees or the public is nitrous oxides – or NOx’s. We can see these after a blast oftentimes if you notice a big cloud of red, orange or yellow fumes. The easy solution to eliminate those entirely is [to] remove the nitrogen from the explosive.

Today, that’s where most of that civil industry is focusing. How do we get rid of nitrogen from our explosive formulations while ensuring good power, good stability, safe manufacturing and safe use on the bench? That’s sort of the test that we’re being put through right now.

Today, the biggest innovation is looking like it’s going to come from hydrogen peroxide-based emulsion explosives. There are several formations that have been developed and are being tested. Many of these have been tested in large scale already, and they seem to be safe, stable [and] easy to use. The biggest question on this front is going to be: Can they bring the power and energy of these up to match our normal explosives?

If this is going to increase drill and blast costs significantly, we’ll probably find other ways to manage these toxic gases rather than switching to an entirely new explosive product.

How effective are these green explosives you’re talking about right now, and where are they being used the most? Also, can we assume the innovation is being driven by regulators?

Right now, most of these green explosives are not being used full scale. I don’t know of any place that’s actively manufacturing them in large enough quantities to supply a mine. The major heads of developments are in Australia, Europe and the United States. We’re working on them ourselves, as well, because it is going to be something that’ needed in the future. I think the mining community demands it, as well.

These NOx’s are causing problems. We see groups like the EPA in the United States and several other regulatory bodies limiting these NOx’s and base nitrogens.

For example, in Canada there’s regulation on the amount of nitrogen that’s allowed in the water supply – or ammonium nitrate. There are sort of multiple things we’re combatting here.

Right now, they’re not being used on a wide scale but they will probably come about in one of these countries where environmental regulations are going to force them to be used.

In terms of energy right now, depending on the manufacturing capabilities they’re somewhere around 40 [to] 80 percent of your typical emulsion. There are other groups that claim they’ve gotten close to a normal emulsion in terms of strength, but we’ve yet to see these applied to a wide-scale area where we can really see how they’re going to work in the blasting process.

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