South Africa recently hosted the most intensive mineral systems thrust ever conducted by the exploration advancement programme being innovatively implemented by major mining company BHP.

Brought together under the Xplor banner were junior exploration companies, geoscience organisations, and technology teams that collectively span the currently crucial discovery system.

Selected for this year’s BHP Xplor were ten early-stage exploration and technology companies, making it the programme’s largest-ever cohort.

Moreover, it was also the first time ever that a BHP Xplor bootcamp was conducted outside of Australia or Canada.

“We’re really excited about being here,” BHP group exploration officer Tim O’Connor enthused to Engineering News & Mining Weekly from Cape Town.

“The cohort is with us here. I’ve got most of my leadership team here. Hopefully most of them will go to Mining Indaba next week, meet some of the vendors to understand the local environments that we have here and across Africa, which will be very exciting.

“But this week, we’ve come together to talk about things like geology. We’ll talk about our view of mineral systems that we’ve got from our work around the world. We talk about business strategy and how we run programmes safely and sustainably.

“Later on, we’ll bring the cohort together, and we’ll talk about things like external networks and vendors and introduce members to the sorts of partners that they might need, the sorts of vendors they might need to accelerate.Lastly, at the end, we’ll talk about scaling up. These aren’t just ideas and explorers; these are companies that need to know how to sustain through the long term.

“We work with them, and they work with each other to help to define what scaling up actually looks like, and how do they move faster.

“Working collectively is what helps to make the programme successful. By the end of it, we know that we wouldn’t have had that idea ourselves and put some money into it to see if we can accelerate the idea further through drilling or geophysics, or what have you, and we’re still working through the beginning parts of the first few cohorts right now.

“What also makes this year special is that we have a company from South Africa. We’re pleased to be partnering with Orion Minerals on the ideas they have within the Northern Cape, and looking at older geology in new ways, bringing some of our expertise. Orion’s technical depth in the region is something that we’re excited to explore together over the next nine months,” O’Connor explained.

As part of the programme, a number of Orion’s South African exploration project companies will receive an aggregate equity-free grant of $500 000, access to BHP’s technical specialists, and structured support to advance geological concepts at the company’s Northern Cape exploration projects in South Africa.

What is very interesting is that the possibility of deeper copper-centric metal systems in South Africa’s Northern Cape was to be intensively probed.

Orion is advancing a portfolio of copper and zinc assets in South Africa’s Northern Cape and through Xplor, it will have the chance to apply modern data analytics and innovative mineral systems thinking across its large tenement package, which could assist the company to identify new discovery opportunities beyond known deposits.

O’Connor made strong reference to the quickly evolving nature of exploration and highlighted that new tools, better data, and different ways of working are changing how early-stage ideas are tested and refined.

He spoke of this year’s cohort reflecting that shift while bringing together explorers and technology developers who are approaching discovery in thoughtful and practical ways.

“Xplor gives us a valuable opportunity to learn alongside them and explore what discovery could look like in the future. We know the role that juniors play in terms of a healthy ecosystem of discovery and one of the challenges we’re seeing even now with high metals prices, is a junior sector that is struggling to get funding, as well as a funding model that tends to reward small deposits, so effectively staying on the treadmill of funding and doing what benefits near-term returns for shareholders, and that’s a challenge that juniors have,” O’Connor explained.

“The goal of the equity-free $500 000 and the reason why it is equity free is because this is an idea that a junior is bringing, and what we want them to do is be able to get off that funding treadmill for just a little bit, to be able to sponsor them, and to them we can bring our geologic expertise, our technologies, our connections, and we can work together to move the needle on something that otherwise never would have gotten the light of day.

“Again, the $500 000 is designed to be equity free within that space, so we can have that conversation. I should say, though, if, in fact, there’s a partnership opportunity when we get to the end of it, then we would move towards a more traditional earning-type model in the $10-million to $20 million work programmes within that space. We’ve done that with a good number of the companies that we’ve had to this point,” O’Connor outlined.