Mineral System Modelling of Base Metal Systems - Key Challenges and Opportunities

Success in minerals exploration has declined in recent years, with fewer quality discoveries and increasing discovery costs on a per unit basis. This reflects to a large extent the increasing exploration maturity of outcropping and near-surface environments in established metallogenic provinces and districts. Minerals exploration is becoming increasingly technically challenging and more expensive. More effective exploration targeting across a range of scales is therefore essential to increase success rates and potentially reverse or slow the trend of increased discovery costs.

Understanding the mineral system more holistically enables us to de-risk exploration investment decisions and to better predict the economic potential of an area under exploration. Only when we consider and quantify all system-critical processes over geological time, that a robust validation of a mineral system is possible and allows us to test various system hypotheses. The resulting mineral system models then allow us to define the key risk factors for an effective resource assessment.

Mineralization events require a working mineral system over a specific time period. Here we combine “basin modeling”, through geological time, with “reactive transport modeling”. This allows us to simulate mineral systems to quantitatively assess the impact of uncertainties and the effectiveness of the metal concentration processes.