My punctured hubris

There was no contribution last week because your correspondent was having a short break watching southern right whales and enjoying the splendiferous wildflowers growing on top of the beautiful Mt Barren Group quartzites and schists in the Fitzgerald River National Park.

During the trip I was struck once again by how vast the distances in Western Australia are and how relatively limited our mineral exploration effort has been.

The latter is the result of all kinds of influences, not least of which has beenblinkering due to restrictive geological paradigms.

A former exploration manager basically forbade my team from exploring west of Southern Cross because the southwest region was “all granites”, had no mineral prospectivity and the farmers were too difficult to deal with.

Not surprisingly, the perception that the region had no prospectivity was precisely because it had not been effectively explored.

Nevertheless, this lack of geological vision is something that helps create seemingly endless cycles of opportunity for exploration companies.

The interest in different commodities changes over time, as does the economics of mining, as does our exploration techniques.

The end result is that explorers will repeatedly visit the same areas with new ideas about the geology and the potential for a mineral discovery.

A case in point is the current, quite justified excitement about hard-rock lithium deposits in WA.

In my early travels looking for gold and nickel I noted numerous pegmatites, some of which contained the lithium mineral spodumene.

Geologically interesting but of no economic value at the time.

In the past few years, as lithium became the clear front-runner in the battery metals sector, I checked into one particularly rich area I remembered, with a naïve vision that I had some inside knowledge about something good.

Imagine my dismay then, to find that I was very late to the party – not only had “my” pegmatites been rediscovered, but they were already also part of a drilled-out resource.

My hubris was suitably punctured but at least I was right about the geology.

The lesson then, if any, is that successful explorers need to be acutely aware that they may not find what they were looking for and need to be open to a range of opportunities.

Unfortunately, what they do find might not actually be recognised or have any commercial value until decades in the future. At least there is some benefit to having a few aging geo’s around.

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