And while the Hydrogen Sulfide levels in the area near ASR/BSI are higher than the rest of the river, the company is still adamant that they are doing their best to be environmentally friendly. The regional Environmental Health and Safety manager explained this morning on CTV3's Despierta Belize that their main issue has to do with the temperature of the water. And they have been working on a project to remedy this.
Seidy Lienez, Regional EHS Manager
"Our biggest challenge is the temperature and we have recently, our board approved ten million dollars investment in cooling towers so we are not gonna install on cooling tower nor two, we are gonna install three cooling towers to ensure that we comply with the 35 degrees temperature limit that we have as part of our ECP compliance parameter. So William went a little bit into the explaining how a cooling tower functions but essentially what is does is that we have water at a high temperature coming into the system, we have n ingress of air which allows for heat dissipation through nuzzling effect, like a spraying effect, and increasing in surface area. So you have an exchange of temperature within the system. Once it has undergone the full series then the cool water would come out of the system and basically there are several options or several engineering options that you can see for temperature dissipation. We were considering two, one was spray ponds, really it's the same thing but it's open in a pond setting with a nuzzle spraying in the area. After careful consideration and with consultation with the DOE, the cooling towers was the preferred engineering design to go. We have been working with engineers from Brazil. As you know Brazil is much recognized with not only their cane industry but also their waste water treatment systems. And so we are working with Walsh Engineering, it's an international company widely known, globally recognized, when it comes to the execution of these types of projects so during COVID last year, we were working with them virtually, they have visited the site, we continue to have meetings with them to fine tune the details of the engineering project so it's been a lot of work over a year. 2:"
