By Dr Geoffrey Batt, Minerals Research Institute of Western Australia
Dynamic decision-making delivered by innovation in mineral exploration.
‘Man, this place looks expensive! I feel like I’m wasting a fortune just standing here.’ These are the sage words of none other than Homer Simpson, universally beloved comic buffoon and dad with his heart – mostly – in the right place, in Matt Groening’s long-running series The Simpsons. The subtle joke here is that Homer makes this comment in a 1995 Halloween episode in which he crosses into a 3D universe, rendered in then‑cutting‑edge and consequently prohibitively expensive computer animation.
Homer just standing idly in the fully-rendered 3D landscape (remembering this was the ancient times of the previous millennium – before we all carried graphics-intensive supercomputers around in our pockets) musing on waste was every bit as expensive as it would have been for him to be engaged in any of the comedic hijinks and misunderstandings making up the usual bread and butter of the show.
The message, unmistakably, is that time is money.
This framing could equally apply to the work of a modern exploration geologist at those not-infrequent points where they find themselves frustrated by delays in acquiring the data to validate a sampling program and inform vital project decision-making. Do we commit to a new season in the field? Have we defined a target that would justify commissioning a drill rig? Or do we relinquish the ground and move on?
The fundamental process of mineral exploration and discovery consists of pouring money (albeit in the refined forms of employee wages, equipment hire, consumable resources and the other costs of exploration) into holes in the ground. Successful exploration companies – of which there are many in Australia – continually walk the line of managing this workflow to turn up paydirt before their resources run out.
Even having succeeded with the first critical step of identifying an area worth investigating and securing a tenement where mineral endowment exists, there would still be a long journey ahead for the exploration team – narrowing the search space, tracking down the hidden mineral wealth, defining its character and mineralogy, and putting a plan in place to make its extraction viable – before you start returning positive cash flow.
Get the ground selection wrong and the reality is a stark one. If you’re looking in the wrong place, it doesn’t matter how good your cutting-edge technology may be, and how experienced and knowledgeable your geologists are – you’re going to come up empty.
With this truism front-of-mind, the existential drive of early-stage exploration boils down to gathering the data you need and applying rigorous scientific decision‑making as quickly as possible to determine whether, at the end of the campaign, to commit to more testing, more analysis, more data gathering – more money, let’s not forget – or release the ground and move on to new possibilities.
Grasping the potential for disruption of this time‑sensitive exploration workflow, dynamic Perth startup Portable PPB was announced as Western Australian Innovator of the Year in 2023 for bringing to market the detectORE™ process, servicing the needs of the gold exploration sector. Originally developed and patented by Australia’s national science agency CSIRO, the Portable PPB team refined and commercialised a combination of robust portable technology and proprietary reagents to deliver reliable, validated gold assay results at levels as low as 20 parts per billion, in a field exploration environment, in as little as six hours. To put that performance into context – 20 parts per billion is the equivalent of one gram of gold in 50 tons of rock … or a single shot glass of whisky poured into an Olympic‑sized swimming pool.
That sensitivity is key to the impact of detectORE – a 20 parts per billion detection limit is enough to resolve the subtle geochemical enrichment of gold that might be found in alteration haloes and structural trends surrounding an economic ore body – the kind of early clues a geologist might use to progressively refine their search for a golden needle in the red dirt haystack of a new exploration project.
To reach these levels of sensitivity, conventional mineral exploration would see samples of soil and rock methodically collected across the landscape and freighted to a commercial analytical lab for processing. With luck, you might get those results back in a few weeks. If the lab is busy (and when is a lab not busy when you need it?), that might stretch out to months. And then only with real data in hand will you be able to define the sites to follow up with further sampling and start planning your next field season.
The Portable PPB solution delivers the potential of returning control of that early exploration timeframe to the geologist – informative assay results overnight in the field, while your boots are still caked with dust and the engine of your four-wheel drive is ticking as it cools down … while you’re still there to do something about the results.
Australian explorer Calidus Resources acknowledged the benefit of this technology in accelerating the initial discovery of significant gold mineralisation within its Blue Spec project in Western Australia’s Pilbara region. Applied to initial soil sampling beginning in June 2022, detectORE allowed the Calidus team to analyse samples in the field with a 48-hour turnaround.
That rapidly acquired data – provided to an exploration team still deployed and active in the field – allowed Calidus to dynamically adjust its work plan, and focus fill-in sampling and field mapping on promising domains straight away, and to plan the follow-up drill campaign that would yield the crucial intercepts underpinning an ASX discovery announcement just a few short months later, in November of the same year.
Speeding up the data acquisition process doesn’t change the lay of the land and the distribution of hidden mineral wealth awaiting discovery beneath the surface. It doesn’t change the fundamental exploration process – or the thrill of discovery in the final lucky strike intersecting the ore body. At the reported grades of 40.15 grams per tonne of gold across a six-metre intercept, the Calidus exploration team would still probably have felt an unmistakable rush of elation as the glister of visible gold appeared in the drill tray of their discovery hole.
But it does make the game more efficient by shortening planning and decision-making cycles. To give voice to Calidus Managing Director Dave Reeves on this, detectORE ‘allowed the entire timeframe from sampling to approvals to be compressed so that drilling could be carried out before the end of the field season in the Pilbara’. This saved an estimated seven to eight months from the discovery workflow: seven to eight months of salaries, equipment hire and consumables, as well as deployment costs for an entire field season.
Having opened with the words of a beloved cartoon character, it seems only fitting to finish with another. To quote fashion maven and superhero suit designer Edna Mode in the classic 2004 Pixar movie The Incredibles, ‘Luck favours the prepared, darling.’
