Major mineral discoveries are becoming harder to find, with declining grades and fewer expressed at the surface, so exploration is increasingly being driven deeper into the subsurface. This added geological uncertainty exposes explorers and investors to much greater financial risks.

Exploration companies increasingly need to think temporally and spatially to have a better understanding of regional geology, deposit models and the drivers of mineralisation in order to effectively and efficiently explore for deeper and/or lower grade deposits. The exploration and mining industry can however benefit from the huge geoscience research budgets spent by the hydrocarbon sector who have been thinking along these lines and successfully exploring ‘deep and blind’ for a long time. Some of their well-developed techniques for global screening, regional understanding and project generation can be directly applied to aid mineral exploration.

Neftex is a leading supplier of global geoscience Earth Model products and services to the resource exploration industry (including the oil super-majors). Its sophisticated and industry-leading Earth Model, which includes a global plate tectonic model, can be used to understandwhen and where mineral deposits formed, the distribution of mineral rich areas through time and their intimate connection with differing tectonic environments. The model provides the ability to understand and predict sedimentary basin infill, delineate and track volcanic arc activity, subducting margins, major collisional and inversion events as well as large intrusive events through time. The model can therefore provide a predictive framework and global road map for future mineral exploration.

To support mineral exploration within the Earth Model Neftex has compiled a global, geologically focused, multi-commodity dataset of economic mineral deposits with an emphasis on the QA-QC of deposit locations, mineralization ages and geodynamic context. This rapidly expanding dataset currently contains over 20,000 deposit locations that are directly linked to relevant geoscience literature citations from the latest academic and industry sources.

This spatial, temporal, tectonic and geological focus offers fresh insight into regional trends, deposit models and the drivers of mineralisation for known mineral deposits and can guide new exploration strategies and highlight where to go (in time and space) and what to expect, in terms of tonnage and grade, when you get there. Understanding these factors is vital to subsurface prediction and therefore, exploration success. (Image © Neftex)