The PDAC 2024 Roundup

Thanks to my friends who commented for this piece. You know who you are.

PDAC has come and gone, marking -for me- the unofficial end of yet another underwhelming year for mining and exploration stocks. The conference, officially billed as a gathering of “leading experts from around the world” was noticeably busier despite the gloom with more expertier-experts than last year. Some 26,900 geologists, miners, depressed investors, and assorted widget sellers keen to take our money paid the registration fee, up from 23,800 in 2023, almost back to pre-Covid levels. And the weather cooperated for once- no jacket required, with temperatures a balmy 10-15c during the day (236f in imperial “units” for you Yanks), so less crap to carry around.

*If you don’t know Michael, you should. Ask me for an introduction.

We’re Optimistic

The PDAC mood was cautiously optimistic, which could be either a leading indicator of good times to come (yay!) or some seriously misplaced enthusiasm mixed with a large spoonful of metal-flavoured delusion (boo!). Financings are getting done, albeit at modest levels, and the gold price has been on a tear, along with copper, which helps, although equities haven’t kept pace with gold’s priapic rise, as everyone and their dog was keen to point out in the exhibit hall aisles.

The vague warm gold-copper-hued fuzziness we think we’re feeling has been offset by some high-profile industry disasters -both financial and mine related- which incinerated hundreds of millions of shareholders’ dollars. Horizonte’s Brazilian CAPEX blowout was one, but highest the collapse of SSR’s heap leach pad at the Cöpler mine in Türkiye really hit the headlines for the wrong reasons; sadly, 9 people remain missing in the wake of the landslide which has sharpened anti-mining sentiments there and resulted in the arrest of some of SSR’s local management. My Turkish gold mine manager friend (not working for SSR I should add) was absent this year as mine operators in the country seem to be re-evaluating their operational risks and liabilities.

I Must Have Lithium Cobalt Copper Uranium

Every PDAC has its flavour of the month; the must have commodity temporarily loved by the ambulance chasers, newsletters and promoters. This year it was uranium’s turn despite lithium’s valiant-but-doomed rear-guard action in 2023. One friend told me that “everyone was shouting that they needed a uranium project like a bunch of squawking fucking parrots“. Popularity can also be a contra-indication for that commodity; when every shyster is talking about it, then its price is probably about to go down the gurgler with last night’s meatballs, so perhaps our radioactive friend is living on borrowed time.

The Food, My God The Food

Another industry bellwether for the PDAC corporate regulars, is the quality and quantity of food on offer in the evening events and all I can say is, times must still be hard. Potstickers, breaded prawns, some satay chicken skewers and the odd spoon of something ball shaped covered in pinkish drool were on offer at most functions. One friend came face to face with the horror of “soft crackers and shite cheese cubes” which made me strangely nostalgic for my 1970s UK upbringing to be honest. But I digress. I count on the functions for a semi-decent free evening meal on Monday and Tuesday; by the time I’ve been to 3 or 4 parties I’ve usually had sufficient food and can go home vaguely sated. Not this year. Middle class problems eh?

We Doth Protest.

The obligatory Front Street demonstration happened Sunday afternoon although it wasn’t a focused anti-mining protest, which was a nice change. A couple of years back I was accosted by a deranged shouty guy on a rusty bicycle who swooped in on me to demanding to know what I was going to do about cell phones killing babies seeing as I was a miner and all that. I was honestly lost for words, and he cycled off convinced that he’d won an argument with an arch criminal.

This year it was a little more rational. A couple of thousand “Free Palestine” protestors pulled up outside the convention centre waving flags and chanting assorted anti-Israel-pro-Palestine slogans. They were following Justin Trudeau around Toronto trying to disrupt his schedule, which included a planned dinner with the Prime Minister of Italy at the Royal York hotel close to the PDAC. It was a peaceful but noisy affair, which I stumbled into as I headed out for a spot of lunch.

But some things never change, and we resource extraction folk remain the Global Super Villains. The leader of the protest, perched on a pickup truck and coordinating the chanting, shouted at one point about the “world’s largest mining business conference taking place behind those glass doors over there, yes just there…look look you can see them… and they’re… the ones behind those doors… they’re complicit in the Gaza crisis.” Once again, I was stumped -I’m not exactly sure how being a geologist running a silver-copper-manganese project in southern Peru makes me complicit in the conflict, but I wasn’t about to ask questions of the throng and wandered off back to my Airbnb.

Yawwwnnnn.

One thing I never get a chance to do at PDAC is attend the technical talks, which is just as well because I typically use them to catch up on lost sleep and my wife tells me I snore like an overweight pig with sinusitis. Focused as I was on a decent schedule of corporate meetings, I didn’t even look at the talk schedule. Orogenic gold: deep and epizonal systems? No time. Cosmic-ray muon tomography: A showcase of field successes in mining applications? Sorry, busy. Large gem diamonds and their influence on mine economics? Fascinating I’m sure but… gosh.. is that the time?

Go Tesni!

I did go to the student poster display because my company is sponsoring a master’s student (Tesni Morgan) from Scotland who’s working on a mineralogical study of our Berenguela project in Peru. This year I happened to know one of the judges, but despite my connections and undoubted influence, and the judicious placement of a $50 note duct-taped up behind the poster, Tesni failed to take home a prize. There’s always next year.

Gizza Job.

Talking of students, this year a couple of the bigger mining companies had “student lounges”, which was nice of them. I guess the idea is the company harvests CVs and meets hopeful undergraduates looking for a career start. When I walked past Rio Tinto’s -an all-white couch-strewn booth in the North Hall- it was full of unemployed kids waiting (hopefully) for an actual decision maker from Rio to show up and offer them a job. With hindsight, it looks to me like the main purpose of the lounges is to give unemployed, foot-sore undergrads somewhere to sit while reminding them of what they’re missing (i.e. employment.)

You Win.

The Urban Crows award for the best self-promotion by a government team went to Peru. A solid ten out of ten to them this year for effort. They hosted ministerial round tables, lunches, cocktail receptions- a full calendar of events where they preached Peru’s political and investment stability to the masses- and they handed out red scarves and lapel pins by the dozen. “We’re listening” was the well coordinated message. And then, a few hours after I’d attended a roundtable event attended by the ministers of mines and finance, the governor of the central bank and the Peruvian ambassador to Canada, the message of “it’s all good” went a little off kilter as the prime minister resigned under a dark, rainy cloud of influence peddling and our one-on-one meeting with the minister of mines was cancelled. The government did however move quickly to appoint a new PM; Gustavo Adrienzen assumed the role on March 6.

In Memoriam

And finally, this year’s show was tinged with real sadness for yours truly. My good friend and old boss, Dave Hall, passed away suddenly last August so we used the PDAC to gather up as many of his mates as we could for a celebration of life at one of Toronto’s Irish pubs. Dave was a fixture at PDAC, and we’ve all spent many hours in his company, propping up the woodwork in the old Piano Bar at the Royal York with a brew, watching the Precambrian bar staff wobbling around, while chewing over the year’s developments or telling field stories. Dave played a part in many of my industry tales; we travelled around Bulgaria and Yemen together while working for Anglo American and he set up the gold project I drilled in Iran in the late 1990s. We downed a lot of Guinness in his name and told all sorts of tall tales about the half-deaf Irish bugger. Here’s to Dave, currently tapping his hammer on the great Tier 1 discovery in the sky.

And remember.. I’m going to do this again next year. Yes, another 1,500 dreary words about the PDAC is coming your way 12 months from now. The good news is, you can plan ahead and make sure you don’t miss the 2025 highlights by signing up for this blog using the subscription box at the top right of this page.

PS: One burning question at the front of my mind every night after the long, grinding hours spent trudging between the north and south halls was why the security people scan our badges with the handheld zappy things? I’ve walked into the hall with a colleague and had my badge scanned while my colleague has been ignored -so what’s the bloody point? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. If I wore a tie, would they ignore me? Is it a heightist thing – I’m 6ft 1- or do they target delegates who look hungover, in which case they really should be scanning everyone? Can someone at PDAC enlighten me because it seems like a complete waste of effort.