REGIONAL FOCUS
Queensland exploration: around the state’s new mine sites
Queensland has announced a A$2.5m fund for exploration projects, and miners big and small are looking to expand their operations. JP Casey investigates.
M
ining remains a cornerstone of the Australian economy, and no more so than in the mineral-rich state of Queensland. According to figures from the state government, mining made up 11.7% of the state’s economy between 2019 and 2020, contributing close to A$40bn in funds.
The sector also employed around 36,000 people as of 2020, proving a resilient source of employment for Queenslanders amid pressures such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, with the number of people employed in mining increasing each year since 2017. Yet much of this wealth and employment is tied up in a small number of vast mines that dominate both the state, and Australia’s, mining industry.
The Peak Downs coal mine in the Bowen Basin boasts an annual production of around 12 million tonnes of coal, and the Adani Carmichael mine, initially proposed as a titanic project with an annual output of 60 million tonnes, has since had its ambitions scaled back in the wake of anger from environmental and indigenous groups.
Projects such as these are undoubtedly productive and profitable, but with increasing awareness of the damage that these kinds of facilities can do to the environment, there is a delicate balance to be struck in Queensland between reliance on mining for money and employment, and minimising environmental damage.
Perhaps in response to this, the state government has unveiled a new funding scheme to support what it calls “next-gen mineral discoveries”. The Collaborative Exploration Initiative (CEI) will see A$2.5m in funding granted to miners eager to explore for minerals at untapped sites across the state, alongside support from the state’s Open Data Portal, an open-source database of mineral and geological information to aid in exploration work.
The scheme could help usher in a new generation of smaller mines, focused on speciality minerals, and help shift the balance of power in Queensland mining away from the giant coal plants that have dominated the sector for a generation.
// Main image: Dump Truck with Coal on a Haul Road. Credit: CUHRIG
TECK’S MOUNT ISA EXPLORATION
One of the biggest firms to benefit from the Queensland funding is Canadian mining giant Teck. The miner will explore a site covering more than 100 square kilometres between Mount Isa and the town of Cloncurry in northern Queensland, and is aiming to uncover deposits of copper, gold, lead, zinc, and rare earth minerals, all of which are known to be present in the area.
While the miner was first granted an exploration permit in 2018, it hopes to use the data provided by the open-source database to confirm its own analysis of mineral availability in the area.
The Queensland Government announced that Teck would use this information to drill for lead, zinc, and copper south of Mount Isa, in the region already awarded for exploration permitting.
The move could lead to Teck’s first producing mine in Australia, having set up several mines across North and South America already. Teck’s involvement could also set a precedent for other large-scale international companies eager to expand into the Queensland mining sector, but who have felt squeezed out by the state’s reliance on large-scale projects, such as Peak Downs and Carmichael.
Many of the miners set to benefit from the state funding are smaller companies, based in Queensland, but the work of Teck could help demonstrate that Queensland’s resources are open to exploration and exploitation from larger overseas companies.
Chinova’s Cloncurry expansion
One local miner is Chinova, which has worked deposits much closer to Cloncurry since 2003. Chinova’s flagship projects include the Merlin deposit, which boasts the world’s highest-grade reserves of molybdenum and rhenium.
The miner’s latest figures put the total quantity of minerals in the region at 6.4 million tonnes, with a molybdenum and rhenium grade of 1.5%. This grade improves to 2.3% when considering just the measured deposits, and the company is optimistic about the future of the deposit.
Similarly, the miner has completed drilling work at its Mount Dore, Swan, and Victoria Stuart projects in the region to uncover further copper deposits. At the Swan deposit alone, there is a total mineral value of 317.7 million tonnes, with a copper grade of 0.56% and a gold ratio of 0.34 grammes per tonne, strong resource estimates that suggest the future is bright for the miner.
Chinova’s work also builds on a rich history of mining in the area, with the decades prior to 2003 yielding over 217,000 tonnes of copper, and now looks to combine its historical expertise with the information offered by the Queensland Government to develop strong supply chains of speciality minerals.
The miner’s new initiatives include the collection of sediment from local streams in what the state described as the “under-explored Selwyn region”. This focus on the collection of data, and collection of data from a somewhat unlikely source, reflects the broader push for greater knowledge and understanding of the state’s mineral disposition at the heart of the government’s CEI project.
Strategic Energy Resources’ “ISA Undercover Initiative”
To the north of Mount Isa, Strategic Energy Resources (SER) boasts a pair of exploration permits covering ground that it believes are continuation of the mineral deposits beneath the mountain, but that have not yet been exploited by other miners in the area. Collectively, these deposits are known as the “ISA Undercover Initiative”, and SER expects to find significant deposits of copper and gold within the permitting areas.
The miner received $A165,000 in direct funding from the CEI scheme to explore these deposits further, with two-thirds of the money set to be spent on drilling, a clear sign of the practical work that the state government expects to be done as part of its project.
The remainder of this money is to be spent on a “deep learning-based model” to improve future exploration work in the area. This model, developed in tandem with machine learning firm Caldera Analytics, aims to create a mechanism to predict what kinds of minerals could be found in a given area, based on historical data of the mineralogy of other parts of the world.
Critically, this system has been dubbed a “live geological interpretation” by SER, and it aims to be one that adapts and changes as more data is uncovered, rather than a static model, whose predictions can become outdated as more information is revealed.
Thomson’s magnetic exploration
Also in the north of the state is a network of exploration permits owned by Thomson Resources, covering close to 600 square kilometres. The region covers a range of known gold deposits, including dozens of reported excavations where the gold grade was greater than one gram per tonne of mineral mined, but the highlight of the project is the “high-resolution aeromagnetic survey”, as Thomson puts it.
The miner will receive A$100,000 from the CEI to build on the exploration work it completed in 2020, which relied on magnetic testing to reveal 31 “highly anomalous” samples of mineral deposits in the region, alongside 82 simply “anomalous” samples.
These unusual results led to greater investigation of the mineralogy of the region, and revealed many of the gold reserves that now form the backbone of Thomson’s exploration permits in the area. The miner is now eager to use the state funding to expand its process of magnetics-based mineral testing.
This process has already revealed encouraging information about the miner’s deposits, including the fact that the minerals beneath one permitting region extend to a depth of one kilometre. and this investment in and usage of new exploration techniques will be good news for the state government, eager as it is to fund new exploration processes.
Ballymore’s costal projects
One of the largest exploration licences covered by the new project is Ballymore’s network of permits across the east coast of Queensland. From Ruddygore in the north to Dittmer in the south, near Bowen, the miner owns land covering some 1,355 square kilometres, and already boasts significant production, such as the 55,000 ounces of gold mined at Dittmer in the 20th century.
The CEI funding will be put towards exploratory drilling work, focusing on Ballymore’s Ravenswood project, which already includes dozens of what the miner calls “drill-ready targets”, that are simply waiting to be explored. Ballymore plans to use the state funding to explore deposits around Seventy Mile Mount and Pinnacle Creek.
The aim is to find mineral bands similar to that of the Mount Leyshon Corridor, a strip of gold and silver that formed the backbone of rare metal mining in the region between 1986 and 2002. This corridor encompasses all four of Ballymore’s priority mining areas, and there is hope that the new exploration work will reveal mining projects that could reignite gold and silver mining in the area.
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