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The anticipated need for more high-quality metal sources will drive a fundamental paradigm shift in the behaviour of the exploration industry over the next 10 years, according to Professor T. Campbell McCuaig , Director and Professorial Fellow at UWA's Centre for Exploration Targeting.

The industry will need to become more dependent on accurate targeting and ranking of mineral systems by conceptual methods.  This shift was made by the petroleum industry more than 30 years ago.

The shift is driven by a number of factors. Declining exploration success rates using current detection technologies is just one factor.

A more complex issue is humanity's growing demand (particularly in developing Asian nations) for mineral and energy resources, and the inability of the current resource base to meet this demand.  Greenfields areas and areas under challenging cover must therefore be opened up for exploration to discover new mineral fields.  Juxtaposed with this is the expense and lack of detection technology to effectively ‘prospect' in this new exploration search space, and the increasing demands of society (now translating into legislation) that the mining industry continue to reduce its physical, social and environmental footprint.

The required move to greenfields exploration in challenging terrains is driving new approaches to better ground selection, and will drive development of technologies to image and detect mineralisation in these new search spaces. Intelligent development and combination of empirical and conceptual methods to target and monitor performance will also be required to improve the exploration success rates.

Traditional studies of ore deposits have focused on understanding processes and geological features at the mine, and our understanding of processes that operate at this scale has improved dramatically over the past several decades and is encapsulated in sophisticated ore deposit models in the literature. Yet we are still no better at discovering new ore bodies. What these studies have shown us is that at the scale of the deposit, there are no differences in structure, geological characteristics, or ore fluids detected between giant deposits and small deposits. That is because the deposit scale studies are at the wrong scale for predictive targeting.

There is a trend in economic geology towards mineral systems science, which views mineral deposits as small expressions of much larger earth systems. The mineral systems approach focuses on the critical processes that operate at all scales to focus energy and mass transfer from metal source regions to the site of the deposit. Because this approach focuses on processes that must occur for ore deposition, mineral systems lend themselves to a probabilistic approach to target generation and ranking, and allow us to better quantify risk and value in the exploration process.

Although there is growing adoption of a mineral systems approach to metal exploration in both academia and industry, there remains confusion in the translation of mineral system understanding into effective exploration targeting systems, including targeting models and target ranking methodologies. A major reason for this confusion is the lack of a well established conceptual framework for linking the scientific understanding of mineral systems to their practical application in mineral exploration.

A key element of this framework is a four-step process for linking the conceptual components of a mineral system with the data actually available to support practical exploration targeting. These four steps include progressive translation from (1) critical processes of the mineral system, to (2) constituent processes of the mineral system, to (3) targeting elements reflected in the geology, and finally, (4) mappable criteria which can be used to detect the targeting elements directly or by proxy.

The Centre for Exploration Targeting at UWA was established as a joint venture by industry and acadaemia to undertake the research required to decrease the risk/reward ratio in exploration and enable the paradigm shift required in exploration to happen.

• Professor T. Campbell McCuaig