Semcan Inc ("SEMCAN") is a publicly traded environmental engineering company listed on the Toronto Venture Exchange. Our key operating subsidiary, Stanco Projects Limited, specializes in designing cost-effective, customized storage, handling and conveying systems for dry and liquid materials.  Most of the company’s work comes from North America and South America, in the following market sectors:
  • Cleanup of water used in the Alberta oil sands extraction activities.  
  • Flue gas desulphurization.  The company is heavily involved in the design and installation of chemical reagent systems used to clean stack emissions from coal-fired power plants, most of which are located in the United States. 
  • Municipal water and wastewater treatment applications.  This encompasses municipal water storage tanks, treatment of potable water and cleanup of municipal waste water.
  • Reagent addition systems and tailings pond cleanup, for the mining industry.

The company’s principal focus is the design, assembly, installation and support of turn-key bulk material handling systems — from the storage silos, to the conveying equipment, to the electronic controls. These systems are custom-designed to meet the unique needs of each customer, and range in value from $50,000 to $7,500,000.  Delivery time for a complete system ranges from three to eighteen months.

In these systems, chemical reagents such as lime, soda ash, trona, polymer or carbon are used to treat the water or emissions.  The company typically acts as a subcontractor to a large engineering firm responsible for the entire project.  The company’s value proposition to the engineering firm is to provide an integrated solution, including engineering and design, sourcing of equipment, project management, optional installation, commissioning and documentation.

In addition to the applications noted above, the company has built systems to transfer food products such as flour, sugar, salt and milk powder. It has also designed systems to handle petrochemical products in pellet, powder and resin forms; and fillers such as calcium carbonate and soda ash.

The company’s prospects are strong given the growth of government regulation relating to use of water and cleanup of the environment.  In particular, the pending restriction of access to fresh groundwater for oil sands producers means that producers will have to clean and re-use contaminated water previously produced in their processes.  As well, the continued reliance in the United States on coal-fired electrical generation plants, and tightening regulations concerning the emissions from them, provides an ongoing opportunity to participate in designing and installing new systems, as well as upgrading existing systems, to remove the harmful contaminants from these plants’ emissions.