Strengthening ESG Alignment and Technical Consistency in Advanced Exploration

A Vancouver-headquartered mining company advancing assets in Argentina required coordinated environmental and health and safety support during a critical project phase. While advancing exploration activities, the project was also developing a bankable environmental study to support future financing, a process that necessitated rigorous, consistent, and defensible documentation.

The project team was distributed across jurisdictions, with technical specialists in Argentina and corporate leadership in Vancouver. Junior environmental staff were responsible for managing key workstreams, including health and safety, biodiversity, and regulatory compliance tied to existing permits.

Our role focused on providing technical guidance and quality assurance across these streams. Supported junior staff in developing a management system that met regulatory requirements, structuring their analyses, and ensuring that outputs aligned with both local compliance obligations and broader project objectives.

A central component of our contributions was the review and integration of numerous baseline reports prepared by external consultants. This included verifying consistency across disciplines, aligning impact assessments with proposed methodologies, and ensuring that mitigation measures were coherent and appropriately justified.

In parallel, provided ESG support to the company’s leadership by translating technical findings, compliance status, and project commitments into clear, consolidated inputs for corporate reporting. This helped ensure alignment between site-level activities and the company’s broader ESG commitments and shareholder expectations.

Contract duration: 2021 - 2022

Integrating Environmental and Social Constraints into Mining Expansion Decision-Making

An iron ore expansion project in the Coquimbo Region of Chile presented a complex challenge: how to evaluate growth opportunities in an area already experiencing significant environmental pressure from existing mining and smelting operations. Surrounding communities had developed alongside the industry, while regional air quality thresholds were approaching regulatory limits.

The project required a structured approach to assess expansion scenarios beyond traditional financial metrics, incorporating environmental, social, and sustainability considerations. Many of these factors—such as community impact, air quality sensitivity, and permitting risk—were inherently qualitative and difficult to integrate into CAPEX and OPEX evaluations.

To address this, an existing methodology was refined to translate qualitative ESG factors into quantitative indicators, enabling consistent comparison across production scenarios.

Our primary contribution was establishing a matrix to turn qualitative data into quantitative data in a systematic way, and the development of conceptual production schematics that mapped key inputs and outputs for each scenario, including ore and tailings volumes, diesel consumption, transport distances, power requirements, and water demand across the process and desalination system. These schematics enabled cross-disciplinary alignment for several engineering disciplines and supported clearer evaluation of trade-offs during client-facing meetings.

This integrated approach improved transparency in decision-making and supported the identification of a preferred scenario balancing economic performance with environmental and social constraints.

Timeframe of involvement: 2023 - 2024