Feds join miners, universities to improve exploration success

The Canadian government is joining more than 24 mining companies and 17 Canadian universities to launch a collaborative research project to improve exploration techniques in the mining industry.

The government is providing $5.1 million over five years to the partnership through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), marking the largest collaborative research and development (R&D) grant ever awarded.

Mining companies are augmenting that with $6.7 million in contributions through the Canada Mining Innovation Council (CMIC), bringing the total to $11.8 million.

Laurentian University will lead the research project — known as “Footprints” — and focus on developing effective tools to find deep ore deposits by following the trace elements of those ores, said Gary Goodyear, the Minister of State for Science and Technology, at a Toronto press conference on May 14.

“Exploring for a deeply buried ore deposit is a bit like trying to detect a deeply submerged submarine at sea,” said Michael Lesher, research chair in mineral exploration and professor of economic geology at Laurentian University. “The major goal of this project is to combine the barely detectable signatures of all the available geophysical, mineralogical, geochemical and thermal properties of the rocks, and put those together in new ways to identify the locations of ore deposits,” he explained.

But the goal for the large-scale research project is to improve the Canadian mining sector’s global competiveness, added Lesher, who will be co-leading the Footprints project with Mark Hannington, Goldcorp chair in economic geology and professor of earth sciences at the University of Ottawa.

“Increasing our ability to locate minerals will keep our mining industry on the cutting edge of global exploration, benefitting Canadians for years to come,” Goodyear noted.

Francois Robert, Barrick Gold’s vice-president and chief geologist of global exploration, described the effort as an “unprecedented collaboration” among mining companies, service providers, universities, government institutions and professional associations.

“To me this is a breakthrough for our exploration industry in this country, and it does set the new standard for collaborative R&D, in my opinion,” said Robert, one of the project’s architects, who teamed up with CMIC to attract industry sponsors.

The initial grant application to NSERC included 24 mining companies and 17 universities, but since the project has been approved, the number of industry partners and participating universities have grown to 27 and 24.