Two Australian companies are teaming up to use space technology & AI to speed copper discovery here, reportedly one of the world’s biggest data driven searches.
That’s exciting news for all sorts of reasons. Number one it’s great to see technology being harnessed for practical, real world impact when a lot of talk about technology and mining often just gets lost in the hype or, realistically, takes years to bear fruit.
Two, this is Australian innovation. One of the companies, Inflection Resources, is a copper miner while the other, Fleet Space, is a leading space explorer and was named “Australia’s Fastest Growing Company” last year. This sort of partnership is just what the copper industry needs if its to keep growing, but do it rapidly and sustainably.
Third, this is urgent. We’ve all heard about the growing world copper scarcity—the Royal Bank of Canada says it’ll be 10M tonnes in 10 years—but action and spending on new deposits is nowhere near hitting that level and could need another $200B spent to get there. If you can find the ore that is.
This new Australian partnership could be one quick & smart way forward. Leveraging real-time Ambient Noise Tomography—ANT—survey techniques the two companies have now identified new priority targets hidden under a thick sequence of sedimentary cover in New South Wales. Ore that was overlooked in previous surveys using older technology.
Even just last year Queensland Mines said a $450K helicopter survey there found 37 potential copper sites, but working out what is worth pursuing will take a lot of on the ground work including multiple drill sites. The beauty of the new breakthrough is that it comes with “near-zero environmental impact”.
Of course you’ll soon be able to read about all the latest discovery technology in our soon to be released Exploration report, the last in our Net Zero Copper Mine series.
Cheers, John Fennell.
