Abstract: This course’s content is fundamental to exploration decision-making, such as if/when to continue spending, form joint ventures or divest from projects. This course explains and integrates several themes that are absent from other exploration-mining courses and university teaching. Rather than focus on data analysis and precision, this course instead introduces the equally important (yet insufficiently used) methods to analyze accuracy, uncertainty, risk, probability of success/failure, geological biases and value of information. The course spans exploration geoscience, management, economics, ‘look-back analysis’, strategy and decision quality. It can be applied to any commodity or deposit type. The course attracts exploration managers and senior geologists in particular because of their strategic decision-making roles and responsibility to create exploration project value.

Smart exploration is the foundation for a successful mining industry. We present a series of exploration decisions to progressively smaller scales yet larger costs, to assist explorers efficiently sift through myriad prospective geological/geophysical anomalies to identify the few deposits that justify further investigation.

Few industry professionals can articulate how exploration creates value and the specific informational objectives of each exploration stage. As a consequence, exploration companies often destroy value by continuing to invest in prospects that should have paused. The result is billions spent per year to discover few viable deposits.

This course provides an overview of how exploration can create value, and discusses the informational objectives needed at each exploration stage to support value creation. We discuss staged learning targets and the biases that geoscientists bring to interpretations. Course participants will gain insight into how probability of success/failure, uncertainty, exploration costs, and the value-of-information are integrated to improve exploration decision-making.

For additional information:

https://www.pdac.ca/convention/programming/short-courses/sessions/short-courses/how-to-create-value-and-manage-risks-in-exploration-(online)