Today water is a scarce resource, but one that is fundamentally important and it affects mining. What are the challenges that Water in Mining sets out with regard to this issue?
Water has an extremely important role in the Chilean public agenda and in the world, and taking this into consideration, our operations that use water are going to have to confront increasing challenges in water management. Specifically we have to make our water accounting practices explicit at the public level and we also have to confront challenges that have to do with environmental and social themes. For this reason, Water in Mining 2012 tackles the perennial technical themes; tailings, processing tailings, and geological processes. Additionally, we are going to approach issues that have to do with the intersection of the mining sector specifically with the social and environmental sectors.

A very interesting theme that arose in Water in Mining was that use of seawater for mining. What has the experience of using seawater in mining been?
Well, there are projects that are already utilizing seawater, saltwater and desalinated water. The cases with saltwater are much more recent, for this reason they are in the phase of setting up the systems. The truth is that there is not a single recipe to decide if a project can use saltwater or desalinated water, it depends on each location. There are sites that would not be able to use saltwater. We are getting started here in Chile and in the next 10 to 15 years there is going to be an important development because the growth of future mining that is within sight is so large that it should be approached with sources of water which are complementary to fresh water.