Modern Mining December 2020

EXPERT VIEW

Ore body knowledge can save mining projects from an extinction event

Obtaining comprehensive ore body knowledge should not be seen as a cost, it is an investment that has the potential to avoid company-destroy- ing mistakes, says mining and minerals processing expert Dr John Steen.

A ccording to Steen, the mining industry is struggling to attract new investment capital because it has a history of poor returns to shareholders. Recent analysis showed that much of this poor performance is attributable to write-downs on capital projects because of inadequate investment in gathering infor- mation about the orebody. While the industry pays a lot of atten- tion to gathering data such as reserve size and grade to prove the business case for a mine, the gathering of geological data as insurance against a large downside risk event is rare. Dr Steen, the director of the Bradshaw Research Initiative in Minerals and Mining at The University of British Columbia, and the EY Distinguished Scholar in Metals Futures, will discuss the topic during IMDEX’s Xploration Tech Symposium, a highly anticipated online conference to be held on January 12 and 13 featuring a range of international speakers. The two-day symposium, an annual event usually held in Vancouver, brings together experts at the forefront of inno- vation in the mining and exploration industries and will examine the latest in new

technologies, tools and advanced analytics.

Recycled capital Dr Steen says much of the capital flowing to explorers and miners now is recycled, with investors shifting money around the industry by selling out of companies and projects and into other companies and projects. This is a particular problem in the junior mining sector. “What the industry needs to meet com- modity demand over the next 30, 40 years is new capital; we desperately need new capital,” Dr Steen says. “Across all mined commodities, the places we have to go to and the ore bodies we have to try to find, are getting more and more difficult. “What that means is that the risks asso- ciated with developing both greenfield and brownfield projects are escalating. The best way to ensure against some of those big writedown risks is investing more in ore body knowledge.” Ore body technology Dr Steen says the development of ore body technology is one of the fastest growing sectors in mining. “We have squeezed the productivity lemon as hard as we can,” he

Dr John Steen, director of the Bradshaw Research Initiative in Minerals and Mining at The University of British Columbia, and the EY Distinguished Scholar in Metals Futures. says. “We have tried to extract everything from the milling operation, we have auto- mated our haul trucks. “The big frontier now is for geology. In the past that was something that was always going to be a black box but with the new technology, the analytics and the AI that is coming through we really don’t have an excuse to proceed with projects that shouldn’t have gone ahead or developing a mine project in the wrong way.” He says an analysis of poor returns from companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange shows that most poor returns come from “company destroying” write- downs because project risk has not been managed properly. New tools are starting to make the job of ore body assessment easier. “IMDEX BlastDOG is a classic example; it makes it easier and quicker to get a better picture of the bench and the mine,” concludes Dr Steen. 

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IMDEX Blast DOG is a semi-autonomously deployed system for logging material properties and blast hole characteristics at high spatial density across the bench and mine and is commodity agnostic.

32  MODERN MINING  December 2020