Why is there a misapprehension regarding the image of the mining industry and what can be done to address it?
Given that supply chains are complex, in order for someone to understand the relation between what they consume and where it originated requires conscious thought. There is an old cliché that says that everything we consume is either farmed or mined, and that should turn these sectors into some of the most valued industries. However, this gap in understanding the connection between consumption and material sourcing stems from the industry's inability to educate the public on this matter. With increasingly less enrollments in mine engineering and geoscience professions at universities around the world, the mining sector will have to find ways to attract new talent and/or to do more with less.
What are the operations in IMDEX's portfolio?
IMDEX is over 40 years old and during that time we have been either representing or developing next-generation solutions that address opportunities in the marketplace. Over the last 25 years, we expanded our global reach massively - we are now present in about 70% of the drill sites around the world, and have sales in over 106 countries.
The old ways of mining at scale, which meant the only orebodies deemed economic were the large ones, need to change if we want to meet the growing demand for raw materials. To access deeper or Tier 2 orebodies, we must use technological tools that were not available before.
Mining companies today make $1 billion capital investment decisions in a mine based on 1% of the orebodies’ knowledge; our goal is to find ways to gather more data, of better quality, that will make it possible to access new and bountiful deposits that have been previously overlooked.
Is there an imminent risk to bump into an unbridgeable gap between supply and demand in the coming years?
Changing the cost of finance for different industries depending on their contribution to the net-zero goal; reaching through the traditional supply chains to get direct offtake agreements for critical metals; the purchasing behavior leaning towards EVs even in times of economic uncertainty; and policy agendas being a reflection of consumer behavior and starting to set net zero goals in a compelling way - there are the four major tipping points which have been breached to some degree.
On top of this, the growing demand for copper in the years to come requires innovative ways to obtain more resources with less waste, and in a more affordable way. There is a whole heap of downstream innovation opportunities that come with this challenge. Historically, copper, cobalt, nickel, and lithium accounted for 35% of drilling spend, whereas today they account for 65% of all new projects.
How more efficient can processing become with the help of technology?
We started to reach the physical limits of scale in mining, meaning that we are processing enormously large amounts of waste just to extract that small amount of commodity. It is much harder to be environmentally friendly when you are involved in scale mining as opposed to precision mining, and for this reason, the natural outworking is to use technology to complete those stages in a smarter way. The oil & gas industry started walking on this path a quarter of a century ahead of the mining industry, so a lot of the technologies that we need exist in some shape or form. The opportunity to apply those learnings into hard rock minerals is very real and we must simply act on it.
What are the main objectives you would like to achieve at IMDEX in the coming years?
Since IMDEX is a geoscience-based organization, our strategy is to generate better orebody knowledge, which is the Holy Grail of our industry. Exploring blindly is like telling a surgeon to work in a theater with the lights out and a butter knife, whereas we are trying to use geoscience knowledge to turn the lights on, give them a scalpel and a pathway towards precision mining. Finding the right solutions to customer's challenges, and knowing that we managed to unburden their day job is one of the most rewarding feelings you could get in this industry.
