Proving 5800% more disposal capacity with one validation phase in Minnesota

How an initial Validation Phase de-risked a full-scale Ecovap build during the decommissioning of a mining operation

Six evaporation ponds. Net zero evaporation. For every drop of water that evaporated naturally, Mother Nature gave it back in rainfall at this Minnesota operator. They needed a way to beat the offset, and while there was enough land, land wasn’t what they needed.

The site still had to manage everything already on it, plus every drop of new rainfall, with no production left to offset the cost. Having used all the previous technologies, they had to find something else. Ecovap does what others can’t. By reducing the footprint and increasing the evaporation rate through air-to-surface layered contact, Ecovap helped the site achieve a monumental win when Mother Nature couldn’t send enough water to keep up.

And they proved the concept through the Validation Phase deployment of Ecovap.

“59x faster” sounds too good to be true… is it real?

Yes. And you don’t have to take our word for it. Like many Ecovap clients, this company started with a validation phase for exactly that reason: to prove that the evaporation rate holds up at your site, with your water chemistry and pan evaporation rate, before committing to anything larger.

That’s low-risk by design:

• No Ecovap validation deployment has ever underperformed its projections
• Most are up and running within weeks
• Validation matrixes are built to a standard, optimal size

Adopting full deployment just means adding matching units, not re-engineering from scratch.

From validation matrix to full deployment, without purchasing any additional acreage

When this operator came to Ecovap, they were struggling with net-zero evaporation since rainfall matched the evaporation rate, making their ponds functionally dead weight. Rather than committing to a full build-out, this client started with one standard-size Validation Phase matrix, loaded from a feeder pond drawing off one of their site’s six main ponds. Nothing else about the operation changed.

That pond then evaporated 59x its footprint. Instead of one massive upfront system, they could prove the system worked before phasing in full implementation over the next five years.

Based on those results, the client ordered a full DICE SuperStructure™, which is what we call the Evaporation Matrix™ in large-scale installations. Built on top of one of the same six ponds, this future build will eventually cover 23 acres, a 98.3% smaller footprint than the 1,363 acres of traditional evaporation ponds it replaced, all on land the site already had.