Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / How to Find Copper — Dr. Tim Ireland, First Quantum

Transcript

How to Find Copper — Dr. Tim Ireland, First Quantum · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

0:02
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo, the mic channels where we talk about how an amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
0:14
SPEAKER_01: All right, Dr.
0:14
SPEAKER_01: Tim Ireland, thank you for joining me here.
0:17
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo.
0:18
SPEAKER_01: I'm excited to talk to you about all things exploration here.
0:22
SPEAKER_01: Welcome.
0:22
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for the time.
0:22
SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
0:23
SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you for the invitation.
0:24
SPEAKER_01: It's a pleasure.
0:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
0:26
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so we've got several touch points, including some research, but you've been a valuable resource for me to sort of talk about copper things and copper exploration.
0:34
SPEAKER_01: But we always start with our leading question is how did you get into geoscience?
0:37
SPEAKER_01: Was there like an aha moment?
0:39
SPEAKER_01: Um, everybody has kind of a different story in many ways when it comes to this.
0:43
SPEAKER_01: So, what was your entry point into the field of geology?
0:46
SPEAKER_00: My entry point was perhaps a little unusual.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: I actually do hear the same story really often.
0:51
SPEAKER_00: But in my case, my I grew up in a family that was very heavily involved in in the geoscience industry anyway.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: My when I was little, my mom and dad split up.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: Uh, my mom remarried, and so I had a dad and a stepdad, and they're both geologists.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: Oh, really?
1:05
SPEAKER_01: Oh wow.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: That's yeah.
1:07
SPEAKER_00: My dad worked for a gold mining company.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: He was the expiration manager for a company working in northern the Northern Territory in Australia, and that career was quite successful, and so he's gone from strength to strength in the exploration business.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: My stepfather was a palinologist, so a mic, a micro-paleobotanist.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
1:27
SPEAKER_00: Who worked for the South Australian state government.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: And so I kind of got a and had been a university lecturer for some period of time.
1:33
SPEAKER_00: So I sort of got a view into the academic world via my stepdad.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: And I guess through them, especially through my stepdad, I got, I guess, a lot of did a lot of hiking, spent a lot of time in the bush, and very quickly it became clear that it was a it was something that I was reasonably good at and gave me exposure.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: Was one of very few jobs that let you be in the outdoors a bit.
1:55
SPEAKER_00: That gelled with how I like spending my time.
1:57
SPEAKER_01: So was it a pretty direct path?
1:59
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think, and actually, this is uh I think on your Google Scholar profile, correct me if I'm wrong here.
2:03
SPEAKER_01: I think you have a photo of like you as a baby, maybe with a rock hammer.
2:06
SPEAKER_01: Uh is that is that yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: That's yeah, that I use that profile photo a lot because I think it's really cute.
2:12
SPEAKER_01: It is so cute.
2:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you have like a I can't remember.
2:14
SPEAKER_01: Do you have a hard hard hat on?
2:16
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: It's so cute.
2:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you can't you can't do this anymore, unfortunately.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: That would have been the early 1980s.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: That mine was that's in the floor of an open pit.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: Really?
2:29
SPEAKER_00: That's in the floor of a mine.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: Twaddler in the floor of an open pit.
2:32
SPEAKER_00: That's the floor of an open pit mine.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: It's the mine that had been built by the company for which my dad was the expiration manager.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: So they'd started out as a very small company.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: There was the boss who is effectively the promoter and money raiser guy, Jeff Stewart.
2:45
SPEAKER_00: They had a senior resource geo, come mining mining engineer guide.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: They had my dad, and they had an admin lady.
2:51
SPEAKER_00: So it's four of them.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: So tiny old company.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: And they did what just about everyone told them couldn't be done.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: They went out, you know, a place very remote part of Northern Territory, the sort of the western part of the Northern Territory, 550 kilometers from the nearest Sirius town.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: A place where there had been a gold rush in the 1920s or 1930s.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, they went out there with modern kit.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: Proved that the old timers weren't kidding, and proved up a bunch of gold resource and built a mine.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: But back then, it was this tiny little company, there was very little oversight.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: And dad, as the guy that had been in charge of finding the thing, yeah, ruled the roost.
3:29
SPEAKER_02: And so if he wanted to take this kid in the pit, take this kid in the pit.
3:32
SPEAKER_01: Who's gonna say no?
3:33
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right, right.
3:34
SPEAKER_01: There's no there's no risk assessor being like, you can't do that.
3:37
SPEAKER_01: Are you kidding me?
3:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's awful.
3:39
SPEAKER_00: The thing that's fun looking back at it now, obviously, with a duty of care and much more safety culture having made its way into the mining business.
3:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I look back at that and I think I'm wearing a hard hat, but I'm wearing flip-flops.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, surely the more the higher probability incident there is that I drop a rock on my foot.
3:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
3:57
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're right though.
3:58
SPEAKER_01: It's you're right to use it as it's a totally cute photo.
4:01
SPEAKER_01: I mean, and it that's interesting.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: So, was it just a direct path?
4:04
SPEAKER_01: I mean, from there, from you at the floor of the rock mine with the hard hat on and the rock camera through deviation through education there.
4:11
SPEAKER_01: You sort of took a side route into engineering or something like that?
4:14
SPEAKER_00: No, not not really.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: I I did uh if I if I step through it, I so finished high school having been very much a science-oriented high school, basically, and from there could have done got good marks, could have done whatever science degree I wanted, wasn't really interested in the biological medical side of things, so it was always gonna be something, whether it was engineering or geo.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: And I actually took a year out after finishing high school.
4:39
SPEAKER_00: I took a gap year and went and got a job, got a job as a as a field technician for an exploration company because I wanted to sort of test the waters and decide whether that was the lifestyle that worked, get a feel for what it was really like.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: And so I did that.
4:54
SPEAKER_00: Uh and to be honest, I didn't, I actually didn't enjoy that year very much.
4:58
SPEAKER_00: It was pretty tough.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: But I I enjoyed being out there, but the uh certainly I didn't enjoy the team of people I was working with.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: There were elements of this would have been when was this uh late 90s, I guess.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: There were elements of the health and safety environment that were obviously not being done very well.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, so I came out of that kind of 50-50, not thrilled by that experience, but at least armed with a bunch of money.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: That when I did uh go to university, I was way better off than everyone else who just popped straight out of high school, didn't have any finance behind them.
5:29
SPEAKER_00: So taking a year out to work pre-university served me really well.
5:33
SPEAKER_00: I flirted with doing some different things.
5:35
SPEAKER_00: I'd been uh collecting mineral specimens, I'd got informally I'd done some gemology and gem polishing training, and so I thought about running a jewelry design and gemology line.
5:47
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: Eventually decided that I wasn't basically artistic enough to make that fly.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: And so I fell back to studying geology at university.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay.
5:57
SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, so that happened.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: Bachelor's degree did uh what Australia calls an honours, which is a one-year research project that comes after your bachelor's, equivalent in the UK to an MSI.
6:09
SPEAKER_00: I'm not quite sure what the equivalent would be in in this.
6:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I think we're getting more that's becoming more common, like a four plus one master's basically thing, or uh I forget what different universities call it different things.
6:20
SPEAKER_01: But yes, that's it's a valuable thing.
6:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you did that, and that was I should say I went to the University of Tasmania, which in the Australian geo world is one of the three or four top geoscience unis in the in the country, especially with regard to mineral deposits and water deposit systems.
6:39
SPEAKER_00: And so that research project was about a deposit, world-class zinc deposit called MacArthur River.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: And that really sort of got me involved in academic geology.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: I published a couple of papers out of that and found that I quite I kind of quite like the sort of troubleshooting or problem-solving aspect of how the hell does the world actually work?
6:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: How is it that this patch of land over here has got hundreds of millions of tons of rocks that are chemically so different from all the rocks around them that you can't initially conceive of how that's possible.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: And so I kind of got fascinated by trying to, I guess, solve my little geologic problems as they were.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, so did that, did the honors, was offered at the time to go straight into a PhD project, all so on.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: At university uh Tasmania.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: At the um Codes Postgrad Research Center in Tasmania.
7:27
SPEAKER_00: But that also would have been in sedimentary zinc.
7:29
SPEAKER_00: And the advertisement then was, oh, you could become like the one of the world experts on sedimentary rock hosted zinc.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: Like, sounds a bit narrow.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: Not thrilled about the idea of being the world expert on sedimentary zinc, which I mean, that's no bad thing.
7:41
SPEAKER_00: The world needs zinc and we continue to mine it and people continue to look for it.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: But boxing myself into a niche didn't sound attractive at that time.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: So I went away, got a job in the minerals industry as a junior exploration geo.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: I'd left the uni.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: One of the professors there had said, Hey, okay, if you don't like this PhD project, what would you come back for?
8:02
SPEAKER_00: And I left them with a bit of a shopping list of things that I thought might be attractive.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: Uh quite specifically, I was interested in doing a project that would be really relevant to exploration.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: You know, I've grown up in this exploration world, and ultimately that seemed like uh that sort of detective work side of things seemed like somewhere I wanted to be.
8:19
SPEAKER_00: So I said to them, hey, if you if you've got a project that is district in geographic extent, it's not just one deposit or one place, but it's something that covers you know tens or hundreds of square kilometers and so it has this kind of field of view that is more like uh the way you might go searching for something.
8:37
SPEAKER_00: And if it satisfies a couple of bits of geology that I felt were kind of blind spots in my knowledge base, then I might come back.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: So I went off and worked for a couple of years, and relatively quickly, actually, after about three years, I got a call from the university saying, I think we've got a project for you.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: Oh interesting.
8:55
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: And so that yeah, quite remarkably.
8:58
SPEAKER_00: So I ended up taking on a PhD project after I'd only been working for I think three years, and that was still run through the University of Tasmania, but with a field area in Chile, in one of the one of the big porphyry copper districts in northern Chile.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: Chile is far and away the world's uh greatest copper producer.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: And so if you wanted to cut your teeth in the geoscience around copper deposits and how to find them, then northern Chile was one of the best places to go.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: I agreed to take that on and then ran that study and actually didn't finish it sort of on time.
9:33
SPEAKER_01: Can I ask a couple quick questions here to just to touch on this for students listening?
9:37
SPEAKER_01: Your comment about you know the gap year really struck a chord with me.
9:41
SPEAKER_01: I value people who break up their are not just linear in their education pathway, because I think those things are healthy.
9:47
SPEAKER_01: They often suck.
9:48
SPEAKER_01: I did a gap between undergrad and grad school, and it was you know not fun work.
9:53
SPEAKER_01: It was terrible work, but it was a good motivator for like, hey, there's a reason to go to graduate school.
9:59
SPEAKER_01: Like, I want to do something more than this job that I don't particularly like at the moment.
10:02
SPEAKER_01: And so that's uh it's a valuable thing to do.
10:05
SPEAKER_01: How was your experience in those couple years between masters?
10:08
SPEAKER_01: Was there ever discussion in your mind of like, actually, I don't need a PhD?
10:11
SPEAKER_01: Why would I go back for a PhD?
10:12
SPEAKER_01: I've already got this master's and I've got a job and you presumably like a budding career in that interim.
10:18
SPEAKER_01: So, what was the attraction for going back for the PhD degree?
10:22
SPEAKER_01: Was it purely like interest in science, or was there some strategy, broader strategy for your career development that that was interesting?
10:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think a little bit like you were saying with regard to the gap that you took between your undergrad and postgrad, I think it was that I got the sense during those couple of years of working that there wasn't a ton of professional development opportunity, at least in the companies that I was working with.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: There was a job, you master it pretty quickly.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: And if that job, in my case, that first job, and I'll set the scene a little bit.
10:52
SPEAKER_00: The company I was working for at that time had a very large property package in Western South Australia.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: It was 22,000 square kilometres, which is a remarkably large area by anyone's in anyone's estimate.
11:05
SPEAKER_00: They controlled the whole thing, they had a database of chemistry of effectively soil.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: They'd done some something fancy in how they'd collected the soil.
11:14
SPEAKER_00: They were picking uh particular kind, like bits of the soil, either way, a map of soil chemistry, effectively, and anywhere it had unusual concentrations of gold in it.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: I was told to go and I had control and budget uh to support a drill rig.
11:31
SPEAKER_00: This was uh a simple truck-mounted rig, a thing we call a rotary air blast rab rig, which is quick and dirty, can drill down through weathered rock, can't drill through fresh rock, but can drill through unconsolidated materials and weathered rock to depths of about a hundred meters.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, anywhere that the soil had gold in it, I was supposed to drive out there in my uh in my U, take the drillers out there, mark out, put some like survey pegs in on where I wanted them to drill the holes, they would drill the holes.
12:02
SPEAKER_00: I would record the geology that was in those holes, collect physical samples, send them to a lab.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: We're just testing whether the rock under the land surface is the source of the gold that is showing up as anomalies in the soil.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: And I had one helper to help me collect the physical samples, like team of three or four guys who are operating the drill rig, and that was us just out in the desert for weeks at a time.
12:26
SPEAKER_00: And it's just you know, you learn how to do it over a week or two, and then it's just the same task over and over and over and over.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: And it's like, okay, and I get it, there's a there's a project here, and there's a goal, which is to identify which of these things has a a real hard rock gold source that might become a mine.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: But as a very small team, doing the same thing on repeat for weeks, months on end, that got dry pretty quick.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't really learning very much about even the geology that was like driving those processes.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: I guess I'm a fairly inquisitive sort of person, and so I felt that going back to uni was a way to, I guess, engage with my instinct for understanding how it works rather than just implementing things.
13:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
13:11
SPEAKER_01: Okay, all right, that's a great description.
13:13
SPEAKER_01: So so back to the PhD, you're working on porphyry systems in Chile.
13:17
SPEAKER_01: And what did that look like?
13:19
SPEAKER_01: We did you have a very intimate working relationship with companies then?
13:23
SPEAKER_01: Was it a natural sort of path towards working now for FQM?
13:27
SPEAKER_01: And what was the connection there?
13:28
SPEAKER_01: Or was it from grad school to now, what was that path?
13:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so often that's the case.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: So that PhD was partly funded by the Australian government.
13:40
SPEAKER_00: It was partly funded by a consortium of companies who were sponsoring a much bigger umbrella research project, of which my PhD was a small part.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: But the project where I was working on was ultimately controlled by Anglo-American.
13:54
SPEAKER_00: And so there would have been a natural progression for me to go out of the PhD into working for Anglo.
14:00
SPEAKER_00: It didn't play out like that for a bunch of reasons.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: You know this way better than I do.
14:04
SPEAKER_01: But my understanding in Canada, where I was doing grad school, there's a lot of these sort of master's level projects were really the thing where some exploration company, sometimes juniors or or larger, had a property, wanted a master's student to kind of do some of the initial scientific work on it, just compare and contrast kind of thing.
14:21
SPEAKER_01: But they also really the reason they're funding it in large part is they get a highly trained person out of that who they could potentially hire if they wanted to, and if the person wanted to work for them.
14:29
SPEAKER_01: So there's like a training aspect to this that's that's quite valuable.
14:32
SPEAKER_01: I'm guessing for companies when you're you're either funding a project like that or you're contributing to a consortium, that's a much bigger thing, multiple companies involved is kind of the point, is training.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, absolutely.
14:44
SPEAKER_00: And the and the the consortia idea is an interesting one because it's got obviously multiple students underneath it.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: So as the employer, you can drive that a couple of ways.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: You can promote one of your own people to be the student and receive the education, and then they come back to you as a more highly trained person, or else you're basically shopping.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right, right, right.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: You're looking at all the other students who are doing stuff under the auspices of this umbrella project, and you're trying to decide who caught your eye, who was really impressive.
15:13
SPEAKER_01: So, what do you think about that relationship and that dynamic, both from your experience as a student in that working on projects that were uh had intimate ties to companies and exposure to those versus like a purely academic one that's like you know, not supported by industry, no natural industry ties.
15:28
SPEAKER_01: And then also now from the employer standpoint or from the company perspective, how do you view those types of sort of corporate academic relationships when there's students involved?
15:38
SPEAKER_01: I mean, take it where you want.
15:39
SPEAKER_01: That's a wide open question.
15:40
SPEAKER_01: But that's a that's a neat question.
15:42
SPEAKER_00: Certainly, as a student or as a as a postgrad researcher, I felt that we were kind of treated like cut price consultants.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: Companies had jobs they wanted done, we had to do them.
15:53
SPEAKER_00: And in a negative way, like try to morph that into a thesis somewhere.
15:57
SPEAKER_00: But that in hindsight, I think we misinterpreted that.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: That's definitely what is kind of what we felt at the time.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: But now with the shoe on the other foot and having been on the other side of that negotiation around scoping out a research project and trying to halve up what needs doing so it's both useful to the overall research aim, but is also divided up into manageable chunks that an individual candidate can take on, whether that's an honors level project or a full-blown master's or a PhD.
16:26
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's an interesting shift, Tim.
16:27
SPEAKER_01: I appreciate I really appreciate that because I think for myself, I'll only speak for myself.
16:31
SPEAKER_01: I won't put words in your mouth here, but that for me, that shift was I had a similar sort of attitude as a graduate student.
16:39
SPEAKER_01: And looking back upon it, I think that was sourced from overconfidence in my geological knowledge.
16:45
SPEAKER_01: And I had to go through the PhD process and postdoc to actually learn how much we don't know in our field and to have a healthy forget the Einstein quote, but it's like, you know, education is like telling you what we don't know, or something like that, or beating down your confidence.
16:59
SPEAKER_01: I forget the exact quote.
17:00
SPEAKER_01: But that thing of like the more you know, the more you know we don't know.
17:03
SPEAKER_01: And I hadn't approached that yet, and so I kind of had a little overconfidence, I would say, in like my undergrad geology degree and its utility.
17:11
SPEAKER_01: And so that was yeah, my transition, but it wasn't related to industry in the way you're describing.
17:15
SPEAKER_01: But I don't know, that pings something in my head for like that natural development in a career.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: As an employer, one of the reasons that postgrad degrees are attractive is that the expectation is that you've kind of been through the ringer a little bit in terms of producing work that's been audited to a sense, whether it's been audited by the company representative of the project that you're working on, or whether it's been audited by your professors or by your other peers at the university, you're constantly asked to present in that academic environment where professional critique is what happens to you.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: It's what's fully expected.
17:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
17:51
SPEAKER_00: And so you kind of learn, you have to learn to cop that on the chin and respond to it.
17:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
17:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
17:58
SPEAKER_01: Hopefully in a constructive way.
17:59
SPEAKER_01: No, that's right.
18:00
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it can it's never pleasant to be, you know, judged in the graduate student process, and it always is hard, but that's kind of the point in many ways that these, you know, comprehensive exams and defenses are pushing you.
18:12
SPEAKER_01: And it's good to learn how you behave and and learn what it feels like to be on the margins.
18:16
SPEAKER_01: This is what I described to my PhD students is like the point is to get you to the margin of your knowledge and then get you comfortable out there because it's deeply uncomfortable at first.
18:25
SPEAKER_01: Like to be out where you at that margin, the goal is to get you out there, see where that margin is, where's the margin of your knowledge, and then what do you do?
18:33
SPEAKER_01: How do you think through things when you're out there?
18:35
SPEAKER_01: Because that's a really uncomfortable space.
18:36
SPEAKER_01: Nobody's good at it naturally, and it comes with training.
18:39
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, I like that.
18:40
SPEAKER_00: There's an interesting segue there with regard to exploration because one of the big differences between academia and the commercial or industrial side of this is in academia, you really have to cross your T's and dot your I's and prove to the best of your ability that you're uh what you're claiming is is supported by your evidence.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: And there's no particular money hanging on it.
19:03
SPEAKER_00: If you get it wrong, nobody cares too much, you'll get critiqued, and there'll be something new comes along.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: Okay, you move right along.
19:08
SPEAKER_01: That's but actually nothing changes.
19:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's right.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: Whereas in in the commercial world, you're often tasked with making really quite expensive decisions.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: Well, expensive is a relative judgment call, I guess, but decisions that feel expensive to me, you know, things that might have values counted in multiple millions of dollars or tens of millions, or at the extreme, you know, if you're buying another company, multiple billions of dollars perhaps.
19:32
SPEAKER_00: And you're doing that based on relatively scant information, right?
19:36
SPEAKER_00: And you haven't got uh the time to go and uh cross all the T's and dot all the I's what the company is paying for, really, especially as a technical specialist or principal geologist kind of person, is your experience base.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: What's your gut reaction to this thing?
19:52
SPEAKER_00: And your gut reaction is based on lots of uh subtle things, then you could try to write them down, but it's still relatively scant information.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you have to make that decision and uh live.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you're gonna do that.
20:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
20:04
SPEAKER_00: Right.
20:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it happens on it on a daily basis, like literally this morning, just to illustrate the point.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: I get an email saying advertising a project.
20:12
SPEAKER_00: It's come from someone else in the company I work for, they've had a look at this project, they've physically been there, so they think it's pretty good, that we should invest some money in it.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: And I look at it and I see a few things that I don't think add up to it being a good idea.
20:26
SPEAKER_00: So I write a quick rebuttal technique saying, for reasons X, Y, Z, uh, I think this is something we shouldn't invest in.
20:32
SPEAKER_00: And that conversation goes backwards and forwards.
20:35
SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, across a little group of uh maybe three or four of us who will weigh in on that subject, the company will decide.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: Is it okay is it?
20:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's really quite quite personal in that it's it's not this massive team making these decisions.
20:50
SPEAKER_00: It really does come down to the the instinct and professional experience or knowledge base of a small, generally fairly friendly, I guess.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: A lot of us get along pretty well, and you might move companies a bit until you find a group that you mesh with.
21:05
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
21:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that no, that's a I like that.
21:07
SPEAKER_01: So it's basically so this kind of leads nicely into your job as exploration geologist.
21:12
SPEAKER_01: And I I I forget exactly your title now at FCM, but your role, what is it, what is your role now?
21:17
SPEAKER_01: What is it operating?
21:18
SPEAKER_01: Because it sounds like you're you're kind of an investment committee, at least that's part of the role is like an investment committee.
21:23
SPEAKER_01: See a bunch of projects and evaluate them as a group of people in a friendly way, but in a you have discussions back and forth, you have differences of opinions, but you're a team trying to move forward.
21:33
SPEAKER_00: Because it's not if it were simple, if it were if it were mathematical and there was a definite yes-no answer that could be figured out on paper on a desktop, then we wouldn't be needed.
21:43
SPEAKER_00: You know, then there wouldn't be any competition because everybody would know which are the best projects.
21:47
SPEAKER_00: You'd be able to put them in rank order, and then it would just be a battle to the bank to see who's got the money to buy the things.
21:54
SPEAKER_00: My title at the moment, I'm the principal geologist for exploration at first quantum minerals.
21:59
SPEAKER_00: So first quantum.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Quantum's a global mining company, mostly produces copper.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: To get to this point, I went out of the PhD into a sort of entry-level exploration job at a major company that became a senior exploration job at the same major.
22:14
SPEAKER_01: And this was a major mining company similar to First Quantum.
22:17
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:18
SPEAKER_01: Like mining exploration.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: I was at Newmont.
22:21
SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay.
22:21
SPEAKER_00: Out of the PhD, I worked for Newmont in their regional office in Turkey, which was really a very small, a very small office, and that was really good fun.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, eventually they decided they weren't going to continue in that part of the world and close that office.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: And so I left Newmont at that time.
22:34
SPEAKER_00: This was 2010.
22:36
SPEAKER_00: And then I joined a junior in a role that I was really not prepared for.
22:39
SPEAKER_00: Like they threw me into an expiration management role as a can't remember how old I was at the time, but someone who really didn't had so many gaps in my knowledge that that was that was very much being chucked in the deep end.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: But it was it was good.
22:51
SPEAKER_00: And I I was kind of sharing the job with another guy who was more senior.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: So that worked well.
22:55
SPEAKER_00: And that got me involved in the branch of geology relevant to sediment-hosted copper deposits in Africa.
23:03
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: So that that junior company was operating in the DRC in the Congo.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: It was that job that gave me the lead-in to first quantum, who are very much focused or had been historically focused in Central Africa, Central and Southern Africa.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: That was how I landed at the principal geology.
23:18
SPEAKER_01: Okay, and how long have you been at first quantum now?
23:20
SPEAKER_01: 13 years.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
23:21
SPEAKER_01: All right.
23:21
SPEAKER_01: So what is the major, again, kind of a student focused question?
23:26
SPEAKER_01: What are the principal differences in exploration geology, the job, across deposit types?
23:32
SPEAKER_01: Because you you said zinc, sediment-hosted zinc, you started in, then you went to copper porphyry, then New Mont to presumably gold, then with Newmont?
23:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, it was mostly epithermal and said hosted gold.
23:41
SPEAKER_01: Okay, and now give you exposure to said said hosted, and now you're presumably back in the porphyry world a little bit as well with first quantum.
23:48
SPEAKER_01: So I don't know.
23:50
SPEAKER_01: Open-ended question.
23:51
SPEAKER_01: What are the differences, if any, in how an explorationist works, how what your job is like, what kind of training you might need between deposit types?
24:00
SPEAKER_00: I guess the the philosophy doesn't change very much.
24:02
SPEAKER_00: At the end of the day, exploration's about just narrowing the possible area down in which there could be something worth mining.
24:10
SPEAKER_00: But the broadest you can start out thinking about a like the whole planet or a continent or some relevant geologic terrain.
24:16
SPEAKER_00: If we're looking for porphyry's, they're mostly related to subduction-related magmatic rocks.
24:21
SPEAKER_00: So we're thinking about things that used to be like sort of continental margin volcanic terrains or things like that.
24:28
SPEAKER_00: So you can get from that, or you have you have to start at that very big area, and everything you do is just trying to pin the area smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until you're down at something where either your hypothesis is true and it's there, and you can either walk, walk along and crack a rock and find the metal you're looking for, or drill holes in it to prove that it's there.
24:47
SPEAKER_00: And so there's a whole series of tools that you use, whether they're observed geology or whether they're geochemical or geophysical, that are involved in we call it reducing the search space.
24:58
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
24:58
SPEAKER_00: Down to a point where you your search space is small enough that you're willing to spend money drilling holes, which is really the the expensive part of the game.
25:05
SPEAKER_01: And is there a I guess it wouldn't be like a new new, but maybe an increasing value of geophysics?
25:11
SPEAKER_01: And do the geophysical tools apply broadly across all these suites, or are there very different toolkits that you use to explore for epithermal gold as opposed to porphyry copper or sediment-hosted copper?
25:21
SPEAKER_01: Is the toolkit broadly the same or not?
25:24
SPEAKER_00: The tools that are out there, of course, are the same tools.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: Different ones are more appropriate in different environments.
25:29
SPEAKER_00: And the same goes as part of that process of reducing search space, the type of geology you need to know a lot about changes.
25:37
SPEAKER_00: So in the sediment world, and that doesn't matter whether it's said hosted zinc or said hosted copper, the depositional environments, interpretations of water depth, understanding something about processes of diagenesis and the development or occlusion of porosity and permeability, those are things that might be really important to you that are not things porphyry geologists care about at all, really.
26:00
SPEAKER_00: Whereas a porphyry geologist might be much more interested in the detail of volcanic fasci or volcanic depositional environments, or being able to tell the difference between whether a rock was a shallow intrusion or a lava.
26:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
26:14
SPEAKER_00: Lots of variations on the theme of how geothermal or hydrothermal fluids have altered the mineralogy of those volcanic rocks.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: There's heaps of just a world of research detail and interpretive detail in that stuff in the porphyry space that helps you again narrow the search space as you're looking for a deposit that the the sedimentary world is much less concerned with.
26:37
SPEAKER_00: Because in a in a sedimentary rock, in many cases, the fluid can flow in between the sand grains, can move laterally without breaking the rock so much.
26:46
SPEAKER_00: Whereas in a volcanic rock, which is tougher, fluids tend to move through fractures and there's more explosive activity, understandably.
26:54
SPEAKER_00: So the detail of what things you need to know vary across deposit types.
26:59
SPEAKER_00: And at the extreme, orthomagmatic nickel or polymetallic, nickel, copper, platinum group deposits have a really different kind of fundamental mode of formation.
27:11
SPEAKER_00: We're not talking about metal that was dissolved in water, we're talking about metal that was dissolved in magma that was directly sequestered from the magma by a different kind of magma, effectively a sulfide liquid.
27:23
SPEAKER_00: And the two things are immiscible, like oil and water.
27:25
SPEAKER_00: But if you imagine like two types of immiscible honey that are thick, but they're still trying to be separate from each other, and how does that play out?
27:34
SPEAKER_00: What's the geometry?
27:35
SPEAKER_00: What can you expect?
27:36
SPEAKER_00: That's really different.
27:37
SPEAKER_00: And there's a whole I worked in Finland for a little while, and that really forced me to learn pretty quickly about the geology of ultramatic rocks and and and those magnetic systems.
27:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
27:48
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, you do need you do need some custom knowledge for each deposit type, but the philosophy doesn't change.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: All right.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: Uh to your point around geophysics, it goes runs with the territory.
27:59
SPEAKER_00: If I've got a geophysical method that's good at telling me where there are rocks that are high density, for example, a gravity survey, then that'll be particularly relevant if the ore that I'm looking for is high density.
28:12
SPEAKER_00: So volcanogenic massive sulfide deposits such as the ones that they mine in southern Spain, or lots of the things in the Abertibi, and some of the said hosted zinc and lead deposits, they throw really quite impressive gravity anomalies.
28:25
SPEAKER_00: And so knowing how to use gravity, knowing how to design a survey, how to interpret the data is good for those deposits.
28:31
SPEAKER_00: It's less useful in other places, at least insofar as direct targeting is concerned.
28:36
SPEAKER_00: Graph gravity is almost always useful for understanding the overall geology of your project area.
28:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
28:42
SPEAKER_00: If anyone says, look, should should we do some gravity?
28:44
SPEAKER_00: I generally say yes.
28:45
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
28:46
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, more data is generally better.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: That's like directly identifying the ore body, of course, it only works if your raw body is unnaturally dense.
28:55
SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay, interesting.
28:56
SPEAKER_00: All right.
28:56
SPEAKER_00: You could run that same type of explanation for induced polarization or electromagnetics or magnetic or whatever, whichever method you like.
29:04
SPEAKER_00: They're good, particularly for the characteristics of sun deposit types.
29:08
SPEAKER_00: Okay, awesome.
29:09
SPEAKER_01: Okay, no, that's great.
29:10
SPEAKER_01: That like really nails it, I think, that the philosophy is similar.
29:13
SPEAKER_01: And okay, maybe we could transition because you're bringing up some some geophysics terms, and I'm curious your thoughts on let's say the current shift in mining that at least in the United States has been going through.
29:26
SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you're aware of this, geopolitical shifts broadly.
29:29
SPEAKER_01: It's a boom and bust industry, it always has been.
29:32
SPEAKER_01: What do you think about the current moment?
29:34
SPEAKER_01: Is this another boom cycle, or is this like a step function change in at least the Western world, the approach to minerals and resource extraction with the critical minerals, with supply chain risk, with like reshoring, expertise, all this talk that's coming out of and a lot of action, it seems like, too.
29:53
SPEAKER_01: What do you think about this?
29:54
SPEAKER_01: Is this a boom cycle, big change, systematic change?
29:58
SPEAKER_00: I think it does challenge us with something that might be a bit different to the boom and bust cycles that we've seen over the last whatever it's been 100 years or so through 50 that the boom bust cycle is is has been really quite consistent and well, well documented, I suppose.
30:13
SPEAKER_00: From the point of view that we we're beginning to see governments directly invest in mining operations from the point of view of protecting strategic supply.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: We're a bit late to the game.
30:24
SPEAKER_00: I remember attending a conference in 2007, 2008, International Geology Congress in Oslo, and a delegate from the Chinese Communist Party got up and told the room that the Chinese government were trying to lock down resources of critical metals.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: Really?
30:40
SPEAKER_01: In 2006.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: Almost 20 years ago.
30:42
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
30:43
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
30:44
SPEAKER_01: This is it's so interesting because I uh, you know, for me, I was, you know, graduating college 20 years ago, but it was basically like this is at least in the US.
30:53
SPEAKER_01: I moved to Canada.
30:54
SPEAKER_01: I mean the US, growing up in Michigan, there's no geology relevant industry, really.
30:58
SPEAKER_01: So environmental consultants, it's hydrology.
31:01
SPEAKER_01: So you'd say, tell people you're a geologist, and they're like, uh, what?
31:04
SPEAKER_01: I don't know what that is.
31:04
SPEAKER_01: What the heck do you do all day?
31:06
SPEAKER_01: And then you move to Canada.
31:07
SPEAKER_01: And then Canada being a resource economy, largely, I'm guessing, like Australia, it's like part and parcel for the nation, right?
31:14
SPEAKER_01: Geology is there, especially in Alberta, where there's a huge oil presence.
31:18
SPEAKER_01: And then moving back to the US for a while, I was kind of back again to like, what do you do all day as a geologist type thing?
31:23
SPEAKER_01: But now there's weekly, there's maybe even almost daily, there's Wall Street Journal, New York Times articles about critical metals and mining companies and mining stocks and exploration targets.
31:33
SPEAKER_01: It it feels like this is in the societal conversation in people's frontal lobe in the way that it hasn't been ever, in my relatively, you know, uh not short, but yeah, the sense that that the sources of some of the things that it are now, I guess, publicly discussed as being important that we never knew about.
31:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
31:54
SPEAKER_00: And the same is true recently with the restriction of transport through the stratable moose, with regard not the not just the petroleum itself, but the byproducts and things that we didn't know came from petroleum.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
32:06
SPEAKER_00: And really some quite unusual things like high purity helium.
32:09
SPEAKER_00: That isn't we can't recall exactly what it's important for.
32:12
SPEAKER_01: So super cooling chips or something.
32:13
SPEAKER_01: It's many, it's making chips or something, right?
32:15
SPEAKER_01: Is that like helium-3?
32:17
SPEAKER_01: Extremely pure helium-3 or something.
32:19
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I saw that.
32:19
SPEAKER_01: And then something about salt sulfuric acid.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: 80% of the production is transported through the strait.
32:25
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, there's all this random stuff that now we talk about that we didn't used to.
32:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: Close to home for me, a laboratory, not unlike yours, that we've we've bought services from over the years, had its argon supply for its one of its analytical bits of equipment restricted because most of it came out of the Ukraine.
32:40
SPEAKER_00: Oh, really?
32:41
SPEAKER_00: Oh, interesting.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
32:43
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
32:43
SPEAKER_00: The manufacturer of the equipment would only ensure the equipment if you bought your argon from this particular supplier in the Ukraine.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: And so they couldn't even get it from a different supplier because they'd avoid the insurance on their kit.
32:54
SPEAKER_00: I see.
32:54
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
32:55
SPEAKER_00: All these things that we're learning have very restricted supply.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: Most of it comes from one or two places, and the whole global supply chain, or if anything threatens that supply chain, then you find yourself in trouble really quite rapidly.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, we're talking about those things.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: That conversation is I think it's much more open and more advanced, and perhaps maybe even a bit more sane in the US than it is in Australia.
33:18
SPEAKER_00: Australia is still quite in and the UK to some extent are still really quite in denial.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: They still think that the global marketplace will serve their needs.
33:28
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
33:28
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's interesting.
33:29
SPEAKER_00: When push comes to shove, if your counterparty is really, well, potentially on the other side of a war from you, then they're not going to sell you the things you need.
33:38
SPEAKER_00: That's that seems just patently silly.
33:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
33:40
SPEAKER_01: So Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
33:42
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
33:42
SPEAKER_01: So so in your in, you know, maybe even in your company or in your job or you personally, isn't it an incredibly exciting time to be in mining?
33:50
SPEAKER_01: Are you getting more excited than you did in a previous boom phase?
33:54
SPEAKER_01: Like, is it more systematic than that?
33:57
SPEAKER_00: I guess we could zoom out a little bit and and put the governmental involvement in the mineral minerals business and metals extractive business in a similar bucket to some private equity involvement that's happened.
34:08
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
34:09
SPEAKER_00: Like conventionally mining companies have been funded.
34:12
SPEAKER_00: If they already run mines, well, of course, they reinvest part of the profit in expiration and as I do, looking for a resource that'll become a mine in the future.
34:20
SPEAKER_00: And junior companies who who are not producers, who are only spending money, would raise money on the retail stock exchange.
34:27
SPEAKER_00: They'd get some seed capital from somewhere to get started, but then ultimately run a public offering on the stock exchange.
34:33
SPEAKER_00: And you or I or anyone else could read their prospectus, think that okay, that looks like a serious proposition.
34:40
SPEAKER_00: I'll invest some money in that company.
34:41
SPEAKER_00: That's for wow, as long as certainly since the late 1800s, that's been the way mining companies uh raised money to go and do high-risk expiration.
34:53
SPEAKER_00: But just in the last couple of years, we're seeing more private capital come into the mining business.
35:00
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
35:01
SPEAKER_01: From different sources?
35:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, variety of sources, perhaps sources that would historically have invested in uh pharmaceutical research and development, for example.
35:10
SPEAKER_00: Things that have a similar high risk but potentially high payoff kind of environment.
35:16
SPEAKER_01: In a similar, I'm guessing patient capital, you know, requires seven to fifteen years to see a return on this investment.
35:23
SPEAKER_00: The time frame is is worth talking about because it's something that is, I think, badly misunderstood in many terms, often by government as well.
35:30
SPEAKER_00: That I think the saw some numbers recently, the average time from discovery to production, at least for copper deposits that have gone into production recently, has been something on the order of 22 or 25 years or something like that.
35:42
SPEAKER_00: So things that are being built now on average were were discovered around about the turn of the century.
35:48
SPEAKER_00: And average conceals a a multitude of sins.
35:51
SPEAKER_00: At its quickest, when everything goes really, really well, then you can go from discovery to production in some places in a couple of years.
35:59
SPEAKER_00: Oh, right.
35:59
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
36:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
36:00
SPEAKER_00: But there are other things that have been were discovered, weren't perhaps economic when they were first discovered, but the price of metal has shifted, or the access to infrastructure, this is true for some things in northern BC, has got better as time has gone by.
36:14
SPEAKER_00: There's newer roads or rail or whatever.
36:16
SPEAKER_00: So now the cost of operating the mine is less.
36:20
SPEAKER_00: And so those things can be put into production now, whereas they it didn't make sense some time ago.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: And things like that can sit on the shelf for 60 or 100 years, and that blows out the statistics.
36:31
SPEAKER_00: So realistically, it's probably something more like you mentioned, probably more like 10 or 15 is a kind of normal thing duration from discovery to production decision.
36:40
SPEAKER_01: So on that note of discovery, the I saw a I forget where I saw it, but a chart basically that I don't know how believable it was, but it's from a sort of a research researching the exploration industry itself.
36:51
SPEAKER_01: So but it was basically like looking at across time, a long time horizon, 50 years or maybe more than that, charting the discovery by the discovery technique.
37:00
SPEAKER_01: So like number of mineral deposits are discovered by technique.
37:03
SPEAKER_01: And the there was basically, I don't know, there's a whole bunch of different ways to discover a mineral deposit.
37:09
SPEAKER_01: One of them was a deposit model.
37:11
SPEAKER_01: So they somehow they teased apart like a scientific understanding of a generalized model for how a copper porphyry deposit forms or um epithermal gold or something.
37:22
SPEAKER_01: And that was increasing over the last couple decades, let's say.
37:27
SPEAKER_01: The number of deposits discovered using a deposit model.
37:30
SPEAKER_01: I uh you you probably know the term better than I do, but they are called all deposit models.
37:35
SPEAKER_00: It it seems like a strange way to frame discovery because ultimately the discovery is still made by a geologist walking around in the field with a hammer and and his eyes open, yeah, or a geophysical method or a geochemical like this.
37:48
SPEAKER_00: You still have to do stuff.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: Right.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: You can't just sit at your desk and think about the model.
37:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
37:52
SPEAKER_01: No, that's right.
37:53
SPEAKER_01: So it was a weird, it was a weird construct, which I don't know if I would actually buy the numbers underpinning this discussion.
37:58
SPEAKER_01: But what are, I mean, you you clearly you live at the industry science sort of nexus here, and you have a bunch of papers and you're on papers.
38:07
SPEAKER_01: What are science questions that keep you up at night?
38:09
SPEAKER_01: And are they all relevant to exploration, or are there random ones that you you think about that are maybe less relevant for exploration?
38:16
SPEAKER_00: Oh, there's there's tons of stuff you just at least I find I would just like to know about the world that may or may not be particularly relevant.
38:23
SPEAKER_00: It's very much one of those cases of the closer you look, like the more you dig into detail, the more strange things you find that can't easily be explained by the models we have already.
38:36
SPEAKER_00: And even like I said, I flirted with the gemstone world, I flirted with I collected mineral, like pretty exotic mineral specimens for a time.
38:44
SPEAKER_00: The stranger the better.
38:46
SPEAKER_00: And so yeah, you can you can head off down that path just entertaining, like satisfying your your scientific sort of entertainment brain.
38:54
SPEAKER_00: Totally.
38:55
SPEAKER_00: But none of none of those are going to revolutionize the world, particularly.
38:59
SPEAKER_00: The exploration-relevant stuff is like the really key questions are about quality.
39:03
SPEAKER_00: Those models you're talking about are very good at helping what they really do is help geologists put their observations in a certain context so they know whether they're getting closer to a deposit or if they're further going the wrong direction.
39:15
SPEAKER_00: We customize them for different deposit types and different terrains.
39:19
SPEAKER_00: But they're not very good at helping us determine what's it what's going to be a great deposit, what's going to be a mine that runs for a hundred years, versus one that, yeah, it's there, it satisfies the scientific criteria, but for whatever reason it's too small or it hasn't generated a grade that will be economic.
39:37
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
39:37
SPEAKER_00: And there are, we don't talk about them very much because it's not, it's not really attractive to publish on a thing that's not going to be economic.
39:44
SPEAKER_00: But there are dozens, hundreds of these things, let's call them technical successes.
39:49
SPEAKER_00: Things where the the exploration geologist basically does their job successfully, but the thing they find isn't quite good enough to be a mine.
39:56
SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay.
39:56
SPEAKER_00: For one reason or another.
39:58
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
39:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
39:58
SPEAKER_00: And our models at the moment are not great at that, let's call what, the quality question.
40:03
SPEAKER_00: Is the thing I've found?
40:05
SPEAKER_00: Like I successfully found what I thought I was looking for in terms of the geologic parameters, but it's not economic to build a mine there.
40:13
SPEAKER_00: And so what could I have done differently to help me understand that?
40:17
SPEAKER_00: Help me understand that it was low quality in that case before I spent five million dollars drilling dozens of holes in it.
40:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:25
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
40:26
SPEAKER_00: Oh, interesting.
40:26
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
40:27
SPEAKER_00: Because I like it.
40:27
SPEAKER_00: Because the cost the cost accelerates.
40:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:29
SPEAKER_00: Like the more time you spend and the more you pin down your available space, the more you start doing expensive stuff, drilling lots and lots of holes and doing studies on the economics of how you could extract the metal from the rock, what have you.
40:43
SPEAKER_00: So you ideally our commercial imperative is to make that decision as early as we can.
40:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's a bit of an arms race at the moment between the companies to try to do the science we think we need to make that quality coal early.
40:57
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
40:57
SPEAKER_01: All right.
40:58
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's cool.
40:58
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
40:59
SPEAKER_01: No, that's I that's a really that's a really valuable framing.
41:01
SPEAKER_01: And this actually bridges nicely into this decision-making process.
41:04
SPEAKER_01: AI.
41:05
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's on everybody's mind.
41:06
SPEAKER_01: What are your thoughts?
41:07
SPEAKER_01: How does it affect your day-to-day, if at all, right now?
41:10
SPEAKER_01: How hopeful are you that it will be well, will it be a positive or negative in the exploration industry?
41:16
SPEAKER_01: And then what should students be doing with this AI thing?
41:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
41:22
SPEAKER_01: Very interesting line of inquiry.
41:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
41:24
SPEAKER_01: Because I'm seeing all sorts of companies started, whether it's like, hey, we're digitizing mapping resources using AI or whatever, there's all sorts of they seem to be sort of services companies through the exploration industry.
41:36
SPEAKER_01: So you would contract them to do something.
41:38
SPEAKER_00: That's been uh I I guess there's there's a couple of sides to it.
41:42
SPEAKER_00: At the academic level, there's a bunch of research going on looking at or testing ideas for how could we apply various AI tools in a in a geoscience or exploration space.
41:52
SPEAKER_00: And then some of those have grown out of the academe and into service provider companies.
41:58
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of them at the moment, you probably put them in two camps.
42:01
SPEAKER_00: There are the ones that are just trying to make you more efficient as a geologist, whether that's scraping data out of old reports, whether it's auto georeferencing uh published maps, whether it's coordinating and perhaps aggregating uh multiple layers of data and process.
42:20
SPEAKER_00: I guess we'd normally call prospectivity mapping, where you try to uh basically either sum up or multiply the different ingredients you think are important elements of a geologic map, of a geochemical map, of the land surface, blah, blah, blah, to uh effectively show you a a heat map of which are the best places.
42:38
SPEAKER_00: There are lots of services that are at that end that are saying, this is an amazing black box.
42:42
SPEAKER_00: You can feed me all this stuff, and I'll give you the answer.
42:44
SPEAKER_00: I'm far more skeptical of those.
42:47
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
42:47
SPEAKER_00: Because we've been trying that for a long time, and the machine is really only as good as what you train it on.
42:53
SPEAKER_00: And we're uh we're actually not a very big data environment from the point of view that there aren't that many deposits in the world to use as the training data set, especially for supervised classifications.
43:04
SPEAKER_00: So never mind if your input data is big, if you've only got 10 porphyry deposits in the world that contain more than 100 million tons of contained copper, then 10's not a great enough training set.
43:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
43:15
SPEAKER_01: And they're all presumably a unique little butterfly as well, you know, or snowflake that's like.
43:20
SPEAKER_01: Oh, no, they they do share a few things.
43:21
SPEAKER_01: They do share a few things.
43:22
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
43:23
SPEAKER_00: The the main thing they share is that they're in central Chile.
43:25
SPEAKER_00: But Richard Okay.
43:28
SPEAKER_00: That's good filtering.
43:29
SPEAKER_00: Easy filter there.
43:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
43:30
SPEAKER_00: You had there was an early one of the earlier advertisements for an AI machine of some sort was advertising the way it could identify wolves from dogs just in photographs.
43:41
SPEAKER_00: And that was great.
43:42
SPEAKER_00: You could give it a photograph and it would, I don't know, 95% of the time it would accurately identify the wolf.
43:47
SPEAKER_00: When they dug back into the what it was looking at in the photograph, like what bits of the photograph it was using, it wasn't looking at the animal at all.
43:54
SPEAKER_00: It was looking at the background.
43:55
SPEAKER_00: Oh, really?
43:56
SPEAKER_00: Because all the photos of wolves have got snow behind them.
43:59
SPEAKER_01: That's Funny.
44:00
SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
44:00
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
44:01
SPEAKER_01: So yes.
44:01
SPEAKER_01: All right.
44:02
SPEAKER_00: But at the same point, if you if you feed the information blind into an AI machine, there's a fair chance it'll come back and say, if you want copper, just go to central Chile.
44:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
44:09
SPEAKER_00: So you really need to shepherd the training quite a lot to get them to produce good results.
44:15
SPEAKER_01: No, it resonates, and I I agree with that assessment for the geological sciences.
44:19
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I use AI frequently and every daily, uh multiple, multiple times a day for tasks and stuff like that.
44:24
SPEAKER_01: And it does some, it's an impressive learning tool.
44:27
SPEAKER_01: Like it's great at teaching me stuff I don't really know about or things I'm kind of interested in, or a new software package I'm trying to learn how to use.
44:34
SPEAKER_01: That stuff, it's an incredible assistant.
44:36
SPEAKER_01: I think, you know, it seems like it's at the moment, the current model constructs are great when there's a clear structure in place.
44:43
SPEAKER_01: The training data has structure, language is structure, so it makes sense that that, you know, we know what a tree and a bush are and what the differences are because we've imposed that structure on them.
44:52
SPEAKER_01: Math has structure, biology has more structure.
44:55
SPEAKER_01: I just don't think geology has enough structure to really at the moment at least, you know, compete with a well-trained geologist in this intuition kind of thing.
45:03
SPEAKER_01: Just because we don't know what we don't know.
45:05
SPEAKER_01: It's such an artistic science, it's a historical science, descriptive.
45:09
SPEAKER_00: We don't often document the things that don't fit neatly in the model.
45:12
SPEAKER_00: So you talk about putting putting structure on our knowledge.
45:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but our knowledge is really quite biased.
45:17
SPEAKER_00: That's true.
45:18
SPEAKER_00: So we run a nickel mine in Zambia called Enterprise, which is one of very few uh nickel deposits in the world that isn't related to a magmatic rock.
45:28
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, it shares most of its characteristics with a said-hosted copper deposit, except that the metal budget is different, and we can argue about why, but uh you could uh count on one hand the number of other examples in the world that are like that.
45:42
SPEAKER_00: And yet, had it not been found, then you wouldn't frame it as a thing to go looking for.
45:48
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, suffice to say, yeah, there's there's AI tools out there that are really helpful for us as geologists.
45:54
SPEAKER_00: They make our lives more efficient, as you as you suggested.
45:57
SPEAKER_00: And that's a very competitive space at the moment.
46:00
SPEAKER_00: I suspect out of maybe there's 20 or 30 key providers out there at the moment, they'll buy each other out and it'll consolidate a bit over the next 10 years, I suppose.
46:11
SPEAKER_00: Which to be honest would be nice because at the moment you don't quite know who you have to know enough to know which of these which of these services to buy.
46:19
SPEAKER_00: And so you say what should students be doing.
46:22
SPEAKER_00: I think it's good to be involved, like to deliberately go out of your way to uh try to see where you can apply or or read papers on people applying uh uh AI methods in geoscience, partly so that you know enough to know which services to buy.
46:39
SPEAKER_00: You might go down the path.
46:40
SPEAKER_00: There's a certainly people who set off down the path of doing post-grad research in AI applications in geoscience five or ten years ago, so they're coming out as grads now, or they came out as PhD trained AI geoscientists uh within the last few years, they're making hay at the moment because everybody wants their services.
47:00
SPEAKER_00: If you got started now, uh five years in the future, when you come out, is the market still going to be so clicking hot?
47:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, probably not.
47:06
SPEAKER_00: Don't know that's for sure.
47:08
SPEAKER_00: But there's there's definitely a cohort there, and it's definitely for the moment, there's not enough people in it.
47:12
SPEAKER_00: There's great competition for the people who've got those skills right now.
47:16
SPEAKER_00: So if you were if you're ahead of the curve and already knew something about it and could do a short, fast masters to chuff you out the other side as a geologist who who's got some proper data analytics skills, then you're in a pretty good, pretty good spot.
47:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
47:31
SPEAKER_01: No, that's that's good advice.
47:33
SPEAKER_01: So it sounds like keep focused on the fundamentals, but play around with these tools and experiment with them and understand their limits and and you know test what insight, because it's a it's a such a fast-moving space, too, that it feels hard to predict for students.
47:47
SPEAKER_00: It is, and it's if you know nothing about it, it's completely dizzying and you and you're lost.
47:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think I'd try to keep enough of a finger in that pie that at least you can speak with some sort of frame of reference when when a colleague's talking to you about something or when a third-party provider is offering you a service.
48:04
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, everything looks great, everything has got can be marketed as the shiniest new thing.
48:10
SPEAKER_00: And you're none the wise- Yeah, of course, of course.
48:13
SPEAKER_01: Okay, we are up against the clock a little bit here, Tim.
48:15
SPEAKER_01: How about we just close with our last our our sort of traditional closing question, which is what has been your best day as a geologist?
48:22
SPEAKER_00: That's a neat question.
48:23
SPEAKER_00: And certainly as an explorer, the thing you always want to do is make a discovery.
48:26
SPEAKER_00: A lot of exploration geologists will go through a whole career without really legitimately discovering anything particular.
48:33
SPEAKER_00: And like I I've worked on a number of discovery projects.
48:36
SPEAKER_00: I don't think I can particularly claim that any of them were sort of mine.
48:41
SPEAKER_00: And that's that's it's often the case that it's teamwork.
48:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
48:44
SPEAKER_00: And so I'm still kind of hanging out to that day that I walk up a hill and crack the first rock and uh hallelujah, there is.
48:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but there are days, even despite that, there are several days in my career that have sort of given me that the sense that that's possible, or that I've done, even if it's not a discovery that becomes a mine.
49:01
SPEAKER_00: One of the days during my PhD, I needed to map a pretty steep valley.
49:05
SPEAKER_00: I was working in the Andes in northern Chile, and it was off the mining lease, and so I couldn't get transport from the mine to this spot.
49:13
SPEAKER_00: So during some of my days off, rented a Ute and went and camped in this valley out in the desert, all by myself, just this like amazing gorge of cliffs above me, little strip of sky, starlight, camp out there, make a little fire at night, cook my dinner, got up in the morning, made a massive traverse the next day, scared myself silly climbing up this spire of rock that had I fallen off.
49:37
SPEAKER_00: There was no time to move from.
49:39
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, having walked about 10 miles, I reckon, and gained maybe a mile of elevation, I got to a one outcrop that sort of pinned my hypothesis for this part of the geology of this region.
49:52
SPEAKER_00: And so having the whole combination of being out in the bush, under my own steam, putting myself in some stress and coming through it, and successfully finding the thing I was looking for.
50:01
SPEAKER_01: It's like, yeah, okay, dirty days.
50:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
50:03
SPEAKER_01: Did the the outcrop prove your hypothesis correct?
50:06
SPEAKER_01: Or was it just the different the hypothesis that this will tell you?
50:09
SPEAKER_01: I needed an outcrop.
50:10
SPEAKER_00: I needed an outcrop.
50:11
SPEAKER_00: This was it certainly helped.
50:13
SPEAKER_00: There's a hypothesis in Chile that the coastal, effectively, the coastal terrain is separated from the main plateau by a strike-slip fault with tens of kilometers of displacement on it.
50:24
SPEAKER_00: And it's kind of hard to imagine that a whole chunk of the country could could slip past the a bit like the San Andreas fault or something on that scale.
50:32
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
50:32
SPEAKER_00: We're talking about a thing that was active 30 or 40 million years ago.
50:35
SPEAKER_00: But it's very difficult to actually go put your hand on the damage zone from that structure.
50:40
SPEAKER_00: And if you can do that, then you can take some measurements of the orientation of the slick and lines.
50:46
SPEAKER_00: And in this case, it was a cataclasite had formed, which is to say a rock that has been so strung out that all the fragments or all the crystal grains are effectively long and long and skinny.
50:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and so it's one of the very few places you actually go hand on heart.
50:59
SPEAKER_00: Yes, it's real.
51:00
SPEAKER_00: There it is.
51:00
SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
51:01
SPEAKER_00: It's made of the sort of material you would expect if it's had tens of kilometers of displacement.
51:06
SPEAKER_01: That's exceptional.
51:07
SPEAKER_01: That that is a true geologist's best day, right there.
51:10
SPEAKER_01: That's a good one.
51:11
SPEAKER_01: I like that story.
51:12
SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, here's to looking forward to a discovery day in the in the future.
51:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, indeed.
51:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
51:17
SPEAKER_01: I've still got time.
51:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
51:19
SPEAKER_01: Mine's yeah, but we've got time.
51:21
SPEAKER_01: I could totally understand that that feeling.
51:23
SPEAKER_01: You know, we make sort of there are particular days where it's rare, but a couple days where like the you know, scientific discovery is that sense of discovery is there.
51:32
SPEAKER_01: I can imagine that if there's uh money behind it, it gets more exciting.
51:36
SPEAKER_01: That sense of that feeling of discovery and big deposit, and oh, this is actually societally relevant and important.
51:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that that exponentiates the feeling a bit.
51:44
SPEAKER_00: So one quick tangent on that, given that some of the audience are students, and and I talked before about work working for big companies and small companies.
51:52
SPEAKER_00: In a big company, if you make that discovery, you get some personal kudos, you feel happy about yourself.
51:56
SPEAKER_00: But financially, it's of no particular benefit to you.
51:59
SPEAKER_00: The business rolls along, and whatever I might or my team might discover tomorrow doesn't have a huge impact on the bottom line for a company that's worth Lord knows how many billions of dollars.
52:09
SPEAKER_00: But in a small company, that single discovery really does make the company more valuable, and you're probably being paid in shares, so your personal wealth leverage to what you do is very different in a small company from a big company.
52:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so there's a trade-off.
52:25
SPEAKER_00: Big company will provide you better better professional development support.
52:29
SPEAKER_00: But as I said at the at the start, in my early career, that junior I was working for who gave me 22,000 square Ks of desert in there, had we found something, personally I'd have been much better off.
52:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I see what you're saying.
52:41
SPEAKER_00: Okay, no, that's a good that's a decision you gotta make.
52:43
SPEAKER_00: Good juxtaposition.
52:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
52:45
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
52:45
SPEAKER_01: How how have you considered that throughout your career?
52:47
SPEAKER_00: Different stages of career.
52:49
SPEAKER_00: I've spent some time in small companies, I was exposed to that opportunity, didn't play out particularly well, didn't lose anything from it, and and I've found I've done okay, but if I if I really was trying to like execute a financial reset in my life, and I know people, I know geos who do this, who deliberately work for small startup companies because it gives them that exposure.
53:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
53:09
SPEAKER_00: But it's it's a gamble.
53:10
SPEAKER_00: It's a tricky gamble.
53:11
SPEAKER_01: You know, I and I'm guessing the stabil, you know, stability is is valuable as well in many ways.
53:15
SPEAKER_01: There are times in your life, especially if you've got small kids, for example, when perhaps you you like you want that stability.
53:19
SPEAKER_01: Yep, yep, for sure, for sure.
53:21
SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
53:21
SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, Tim, thank you very much for the time.
53:23
SPEAKER_01: This has been super informative.
53:25
SPEAKER_01: And uh yeah, this is uh I hope maybe an entry point into uh a longer discussion for sure about this type of stuff.
53:31
SPEAKER_01: So, but thanks for the time.
53:32
SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate it.
53:32
SPEAKER_01: This would be very valuable for people.
53:34
SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
53:35
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me, Jesse.
53:36
SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
53:37
SPEAKER_01: Good to talk to you.