With a fundamental need for resource companies to replace diminishing reserves – and new discoveries likely to be under cover, at depth and more complex in structure – the industry faces challenges on multiple fronts.
Leading global mining-tech company IMDEX is at the centre of this transformation, delivering the tools to enable technology driven productivity that is pivotal to tackling the rising costs and the complex geology faced by the mining industry.
Increasingly, it sees the mining industry shifting from cost cutting to seeking productivity enhancements.
The company’s acquisition of Devico – experts in directional drilling – investments in drilling analytics software company Krux Analytics and geoscience image analysis experts Datarock, and commitment to research and development are combining to provide the technology and tools required by modern mining companies.
The aim is to enable mining and exploration companies to safely find, define, and mine orebodies with precision and at speed.
IMDEX CEO Paul House said major resource companies were expanding their exploration budgets to ensure they could meet projected demand for key metals and minerals.
“There is a critical imperative for resource companies to replenish diminishing reserves,” he said. “New discoveries are likely to be deeper with greater orebody complexity that will require larger drilling campaigns, new technology solutions and more complex processing.”
IMDEX chief of strategy Michelle Carey also emphasized exploration: “If you want to find a deposit there is no alternative to drilling a hole – so developing, designing and improving the best tools available to produce the most accurate drilling results, and then delivering that in a way the data can be assessed quickly is central to our approach to maximising exploration success,” she said.
“The mining sector is continuing to move through a technological revolution, with every step in the value chain from exploration to production being exposed to new and innovative solutions powered by cloud-connected devices to enable critical decisions to be made sooner and faster to both maximise the probability of exploration success and reduce the time taken to properly delineate orebodies so they can be mined,” Carey continued.
“Our sensors originate critical data on the four elements of rock knowledge – location, chemistry, mineralogy and texture and our geoscience analytical software enrich data and enable real-time decisions to be made further upstream.”
IMDEX sees this as delivering improved orebody knowledge at every stage, from finding the orebody, to delineating and then optimizing how to mine it.
The company is involved in a two-year study with the Mineral Deposit Research Unit (MDRU) and the Bradshaw Research Institute for Minerals and Mining (BRIMM) at the University of British Columbia, and Ideon Technologies, to determine a method to quantify the value of orebody knowledge.
Unlocking new value in existing assets is reliant on orebody knowledge, with IMDEX BlastDog offering unparalleled insights. BlastDog is a commodity agnostic blast hole sensing and physical measurement technology that will provide near real-time blast hole physicals and orebody knowledge.
Early use cases for the technology have focused on defining material property boundaries leading to better blasting and processing outcomes across iron ore, coal, and porphyry copper.
More information about BlastDog and IMDEX’s other solutions is posted on www.ImdexLimited.com.
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