Month: August 2019

Exploring Communism Pt 2

Of Sticks and Stone

(I hadn’t planned on a Part 2 to my recent Yemeni post, but this story climbed out of my distant memories and seemed to fit.)

Western-style mineral exploration, as practiced by the typical Vancouver junior, is all about efficiency; how to maximize the data you can tease from the ground for each dollar spent. Or rather it should be about efficiency. Experienced hands know that when the markets get excited and frothy about metals, even Blind Freddy and His Dog can raise cash, as my colleague Graham would say. So I guess the concept of efficiency waxes and wanes in tandem with investor interest in resources.

St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia. I explored it.

The Communists, in contrast, were not known for efficient exploration. In last week’s post I took a look at the Communist-sponsored regional exploration of southern Yemen; a piecemeal and ill thought-out mess where the left hand had no clue what the right hand was up to.

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Exploring Communism

The Tethyan Belt Is Calling

After the collapse of the Iron Curtain, Eastern Europe was a rich hunting ground for mineral exploration companies. In the mid-1990s I was part of a small, enthusiastic team assembled by Anglo American PLC under the banner of its subsidiary, Minorco. Anglo essentially gave us carte blanche to conduct reconnaissance exploration along the Tethyan belt from Hungary through to Pakistan, with the odd side trip to visit other regions of interest.

Iranian village kids, late 1990s, exploring their little part of the Tethyan belt.

The Soviet-style exploration carried out under communism was pretty bloody awful. The metallogenic theories they applied were iffy to say the least, and all exploration results were regarded as state secrets. The geologists we hired told us that project information was rationed by the higher-ups, so the underlings never really got to see the whole picture – it was need-to-know stuff, and the juniors didn’t need to know. Any half-decent field geologist will tell you that you can’t explore blind with your hands tied. You have to know the target concept and the results to be able to confidently assess a project.

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How To Finance Your Mining Company. Part 1

I Love Pain.

This week I’m diving head-first into the murk, to take an unpleasant look at the slimy underbelly of the junior mining world. Yes, I’m talking about an ugly hidden world of prostitution, ritual humiliation, sadomasochism and betrayal, also known as junior mining finance.

For the last few years, trying to finance a junior ExploreCo has been a thankless task. Bumming for change outside Starbucks would’ve been more fun; at least that’s spiced up by the odd half-finished Americano and discarded smokes. No such luck in the finance world.

That’ll fund 30cm of RC

Faced with a world of apathetic investors who couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about junior miners, how do you finance your resource company? How do you pay the lifestyle salaries, the bills, and keep the lights on through the down times without the pain of actually exploring for anything? Like an old C90 cassette on repeat, we blather on about hoping to raise $500k here, $250k there, while the world spins, uncaring and increasingly oblivious to our fiscal pain.

Not sure I’d have this on endless repeat.
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The Science of Sampling

& The Art Of Thinking On Your Feet

Eleven out of ten mining and exploration professionals, particularly geostatisticians, agree that the science of sampling is crucial to the discovery process. I’d suggest that everything we do as minerals’ industry geologists can be focused down into that single activity: sampling.

Every dollar we spend on logistics, geophysics, drilling, mapping and beer is spent to collect samples. It’s the ONLY way to check that there’s metal in the fascinating rocks you’ve described in your monthly reports. Geophysics won’t tell you, regardless of what those shifty geophysicists say. Satellites can’t tell you from 300km up, and mapping definitely won’t tell you.

Me (in the orange), 1984, Brittany, about to take a sample.
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The Ghost Train

A Tale Of Equipment Lost

Production is everything in mining. Sorry, I meant to say that safe production is everything. You can’t make money from a big hole in the ground if nothing useful is coming out of it and people are getting hurt.

Anyone who’s worked down a pit will eventually feel the pressure from higher up the food chain to produce more of whatever it is you’re mining. Sometimes the pressure will come from the stroppy, loud-mouthed chief mining engineer shouting at everyone when the mine is below quota. Or perhaps the plant head-grade will be changed constantly, necessitating closer geological control; a panicked attempt to get more ounces through the plant. I’ve experienced both.

Yup. That’s me alright.
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