Exploration
And as we phase out fossil fuels, our need for the metals and minerals key to the energy transition will only increase. Current supply gaps for lithium, nickel, graphite, cobalt, neodymium and copper could all imperil the world’s progress to net zero by 2050, according to the Energy Transitions Commission in a July 2023 report. Annual investment in these key metals averaged at just over $45bn a year for the past two decades, compared with the $70bn required annually through to 2030 to expand supply. Beyond increasing investment, however, it’s clear that the mining industry will also need to step up its game to expand its supply of these metals – for example, it still has to find sufficient deposits of them. The mining industry spends a sizable fortune on exploration – in 2021, Canada alone spent over $800m to hunt down new sources of metals and minerals, while Australia and the US forked out $531.3m and $345.2m, respectively. In 2022, the global total came to $4.055bn. It goes without saying, then, that mineral exploration is big business. Traditional forms of exploration have largely already discovered any ‘easy’ sources of critical minerals, leaving the vast majority of remaining ore deposits concealed under less-explored terrain. New developments in this area, however, seek to improve and speed up modern mineral exploration by introducing AI to the mix.
Adapt to a new paradigm
It would be far from the first time that AI has been tasked with discovering the solution to a problem. Most notably, AI is already being used in healthcare services across the world to analyse MRI images and read brain scans, capable of reading these images and identifying patterns faster than a human can, supporting clinicians and radiologists in making assessments. This can speed up the time it takes for patients to be diagnosed and treated, allowing healthcare services to screen greater numbers of people more quickly, while providing them with the help they need.
“The benefits of AI are not unique to the challenge of discovering mineral deposits,” says Yair Frastai, co-founder and CEO of VerAI Discoveries, a leading AI-based mineral asset generator based in Boston, US, which has developed AI solutions that aim to improve the probability of discovering economic mineral deposits. “There are several industries that depend on their ability to make accurate, faster and cheaper discoveries – at vast scale. Sectors such as medicine, pharma, insurance, finance and homeland security intelligence that, until recently, have been based only on expert knowledge, which is great when it’s working.” What happens, however, when the discovery challenge becomes significantly harder – whether that’s due
World Mining Frontiers /
www.nsenergybusiness.com
to increased scarcity or to time constraints, or the lack of an expert hypothesis to find it? Here, Frastai uses the Covid-19 pandemic as an example, seeing it as a more tangible metaphor for a general audience. With Covid, the need to discover a cure as quickly as possible was of paramount importance, leading to pharmaceutical companies and scientists embracing new technology and eventually driving the development of revolutionary mRNA vaccines over the finish line. “There is no way that a solution can be found so quickly if you’re not deploying new types of technology that bring a different paradigm to the game,” he adds. To date, VerAI has focused its operations on countries with well-established and regulated mining operations in North and South America, having successfully used its AI solutions to discover ore deposits containing lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, gold and silver in Ontario, Arizona, Nevada, Mexico, Chile and Peru. Focusing on these places, however, can present a challenge, as many in the industry believe that all the mining opportunities for sizable new discoveries have already dried up. But this is far from the truth, Frastai claims. “The only thing that has really been exhausted is the low-hanging fruit – everything that was outcropping has already been well developed,” he notes. However, countries like Australia, or US and Canadian states like Arizona, Nevada and Ontario, possess huge areas covered by a veneer of regolith sediments or younger rock, with any valuable ore buried beneath rather than outcropping at the surface. Currently, most of the existing mineral resources that have been discovered and extracted have come from outcropping or near outcropping geology, according to Geoscience Australia, the Australian government’s agency for geoscientific research. This kind of geology covers some 20% of Australia’s total
Rich mineral deposits can still be found under regolith sediments or younger rock, rather than outcropping at the surface.
$4.1bn The amount spent globally on mineral exploration in 2022.
Geoscience Australia 29
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