AIG “Value Creation via Exploration” Seminar – 13th July
- By: John P Sykes
Posted in: Blog, Conferences, Exploration, Recommended
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With a few notable exceptions, minerals exploration is suffering a funding drought. Whilst some factors such as commodity prices and financial crises may be out of the industry’s control, there is much that can be done by the industry itself to help improve the way it creates value for stakeholders. In an attempt to address these issues and hopefully provide some inspiration for minerals exploration professionals to further drive value creation at their companies the Australian Institute of Geoscientists (AIG) is hosting a seminar on “Value Creation via Exploration“.
Date: Monday 13th July 2015
Time: 8am-6pm
Location: Burswood on Swan Convention Centre, 1 Camfield Drive, Burswood, Western Australia, 6100
Cost: A$220 (AIG Members), A$350 (AIG Non-members), A$100 (Students & Unemployed AIG members)
More information: https://www.aig.org.au/events/valuation-creation-via-exploration/
The seminar has been organised by Matt Greentree of SRK Consulting and myself, and hosts a stellar line up of speakers addressing the multiple non-geological and non-technical issues facing exploration and how to incorporate these into an exploration strategy that creates value for all stakeholders.
The first session will cover exploration economics, with Richard Schodde (MinEx Consulting & Centre for Exploration Targeting) reviewing Australia’s exploration performance over the last 40 years; Tim Craske (Geowisdom) giving an industry practitioner’s perspective on the organisational, technical, and economic aspects of exploration; and Julian Vearncombe (SJS Resource Management) looking specifically at exploration value creation success in the gold sector.
The second session will consider how minerals exploration is financed. The first speaker, Liam Twigger (PCF Capital Group) will look at the prospects of the conventional source of exploration funding: the stock markets. The other two speakers will look at potential new significant sources of exploration funding: James Rattenbury (Resource Capital Funds) will discuss the role of private equity; and Alex Atkins (Alternate Futures) will discuss whether there is potential for venture capital, business angel and crowd-sourced funding for exploration.
The third session will try and address the various ‘externalities’ affecting exploration such as environmental, social, community and sustainable development issues. Campbell McCuaig (Centre for Exploration Targeting & The University of Western Australia) will look at how value chain thinking and the social licence to operate need incorporating into exploration and predictive science and ‘boundary spanning’ may help. Allan Trench (Centre for Exploration Targeting & Curtin University) will consider the different types of non-technical risks facing exploration and which risks can be measured and how, presenting some provisional and surprising results on non-technical risk in Africa and South America. Lisa Chandler (Aethos) will talk about the “Stuff that wasn’t in your job description (but you cannot dodge forever)” looking at global environmental and political issues that are affecting the practice of exploration.
The final session will include representatives of different sized mining and exploration companies discussing how they combine exploration economics, finance and externalities with geological and technical factors to create an exploration strategy that generates value for all stakeholders. The speakers in the session are Tony Worth of First Quantum Minerals looking at the role of exploration in a large mining company; Roric Smith of Evolution Mining who will consider value creation from greenfields exploration to exploitation; and finally Justin Osborne of Gold Road Resources will share an example of exploration value creation in the Yamarna terrain.
The day of course will end with a discussion session and sundowner.
The event is kindly sponsored by Haines Surveys, Gyro Australia, Auger, SRK Consulting, HiSeis and the Centre for Exploration Targeting who have helped keep the price of attending very modest. If further incentive is required, attending the seminar also counts as 8 hours of Continuous Professional Development for AIG members seeking to maintain their professional status.
More information is available on the AIG website, including details of how to sign up. See you there!