With the odds of a prospect becoming a mine often estimated at 1 in 1,000 or less, Project Murchison, designed by SRK in partnership with University of Exeter College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, addresses the overriding concern of ‘How can we better direct our resources towards the 1? and walking away from the 999 sooner?’
For any prospect, explorers need to make a series of decisions, starting with initial licence or project selection, and later explore/drop/deal type decisions at regular stages as exploration proceeds. Decisions also need to be taken by other interested parties such as those making investment decisions or governments when offering the land for licencing or tender. But how do we make such decisions in an informed way?
Such decisions should require an assessment of prospectivity weighed against the cost of acquiring, investing and/or exploring the prospect. The best explorers carefully weigh such considerations and conduct detailed analysis; however, too often critical decisions such as whether to acquire or drop a prospect are made on the basis of subjective judgement, and the webs of personal connections often necessary to fund development. Even in the former case of detailed analysis prior to a decision, the analysis is invariably qualitative in nature and highly dependent on individual geologists’ subjective judgement. These problems are particularly acute for grass roots exploration prospects with little exploration data and is one factor that may lead investors to unduly favour brown fields stage projects over green fields exploration.
Prospectivity analysis attempts to deploy a rigorous approach to the assessment necessary for such decisions and can be done with traditional GIS techniques. Increasingly, machine learning is also deployed to make sense of the vast amounts of data. Both approaches provide useful information about which projects are better than others but are not entirely satisfying as they remain firmly in the realm of ‘relative’ prospectivity. They therefore do not inform how much a development is worth dollar terms, and how much should be reasonably spent other than making relative comparisons between prospects on similar terranes. Furthermore, they do not provide information regarding which prospects have high potential to become exploration ‘traps’… that may uncover enough ‘smoke’ to have large amounts spent on them but with little prospect of an economic discovery. These are the prospects with the lowest value, which in fact can be highly negative.
