Subsurface Intelligence to Unlock Critical Minerals Supply (UCM)
Subsurface intelligence solutions to precision-target deposits, accurately map and continuously monitor mine operations.
Project Overview
Updated September 9, 2024
The Problem
A dramatic increase in production of critical minerals is needed to meet the demand for green and digital technology solutions required to meet the world’s carbon reduction commitments.
Mining companies currently rely heavily on invasive, cost-intensive, and time-consuming drilling to understand what’s happening beneath the Earth’s surface. They use these ‘biopsies’ to estimate the position, extent, and behaviour of features such as mineral deposits and geotechnical hazards, making billion-dollar decisions based on fractional knowledge. They are also investing heavily in new mining techniques to unlock challenging deposits but need reliable monitoring and visualization tools to make critical operational decisions with confidence.
How We Are Solving It
This project will aim to deliver a subsurface imaging solution to the global mining industry that reduces time to market, cost, risk, and environmental impact, while facilitating development of the sustainable supply chains needed to fuel the energy transition.
Led by Ideon Technologies in collaboration with Dias Geophysical, VRIFY Technology, Fireweed Metals, and Simon Fraser University (SFU) – and with the support of global mining leaders like BHP and Rio Tinto – the consortium will build, test and deploy subsurface intelligence solutions that will help precision-target deposits, accurately map, and continuously monitor mine operations.
Building on the foundational technologies for mining exploration established during the Earth X-Ray for Low-Impact Mining project, and leveraging advanced 3D visualization, the consortium will expand its focus of the original Earth-X project to include unlocking supply across the full mining value chain – from exploration through operations to tailings management, reclamation and aftercare. This project aims to add new intellectual property (IP) on top of the CAT-scan-like technology advanced through Earth-X to deliver comprehensive, fully commercialized subsurface intelligence for the mining value chain.
The consortium will fuse and leverage multiple geophysical data streams to aim to deliver the highest resolution digital model of the Earth’s subsurface available on the market. It will develop, protect, and introduce new-to-the-world hardware technologies, high quality software, and novel data fusion techniques, AI algorithms, geostatistical methods for optimized measurement, and subsurface modelling to deliver certainty estimates in 3D. The capabilities of these technologies will be demonstrated in field trials with the world’s largest and most innovative mining companies.
