Meet the explorers

FEW ACQUISITIONS. Epiroc has made a habit out of them in recent years. Large-scale investments in automation, electrification and digitalization make immediate sense in the modern world. But exploration? It’s the first question to ask Alex Grant while sitting in his office in an industrial park on the outskirts of Perth, Australia.

Exploration is hard. Any miner will tell you that. Greenfield exploration can last anywhere from two to eight years, with limited guarantees of return on investment. And by nature it’s cyclical, with mining companies historically scaling back on exploration when times are tough.

Yet Epiroc is betting big on exploration and geosciences. You only need look at some of its acquisitions over the past five years. There’s Schramm, for decades regarded as the industry leader in reverse circulation drills.

There’s Corescan, with its cutting edge Hyperspectral Core Imager (HCI) technology. And then there’s Kinetic Logging Services (KLS), where we are now.

Walk out of Grant’s coolly decorated office through a door on your left, and

you’re inside an expansive workshop, engineers buzzing around different Fuso trucks. Some are brand new, others coated in dust from logging time in the Pilbara, their cabs decorated in artwork by indigenous children from the region. All are equipped with a sophisticated Ore-Sight probe, developed in collaboration with French space optronics and neutron technology company Sodern.

Schramm, Corescan and KLS are all barely a five-minute drive from each other in Perth, but together they give Epiroc an enormous leg-up in exploration mining.

“Exploration isn’t easy,” says Grant, Epiroc’s Vice President of Marketing in OreBody Solutions.

“But new technologies are beginning to mature just at a point where, globally, we’re starting to exhaust that low-hanging fruit in terms of deposits.”

“We’re moving into a lower grade future,” agrees Huw Rossiter, Business Development Manager of Geosciences. “If you’re used to getting 4–5 grams per ton of copper, and now it’s 0.6 grams per ton, those deposits wouldn’t have stacked up

as a business case 20 years ago. But with these advances in technology and geosciences, they can.”

BUT MUCH OF Epiroc’s investment in exploration and geosciences will be borne out on existing mine sites in brownfield usage cases. According to Grant and Epiroc’s General Manager for Mining and Technology Penny Dent, the potential gains are staggering.

“What surprised us is that a tier one or tier two producer can dig out the ore, get it on a ship, and there’s the potential they don’t know with a great degree of certainty what’s going out there,” Grant says. “That ship arrives at its destination and maybe they have to offload it and redo the blend to get, say, the iron content higher. Imagine how many millions it costs to fix that.”

Dent’s background before Epiroc was work working for a tier one mining company, lending her unique insight into these challenges.

“Epiroc was thinking of these technologies as an exploration tool,” Dent says. “But I thought, ‘There are millions of dollars in this as a production tool.’ Understanding what’s ore and what’s waste in near real-time has huge implications for mining and supply chain decisions.”

This is OreSight, KLS’s sophisticated downhole assay technology. Key to OreSight is a probe equipped with a pulsed neutron generator. Once initiated down a blast hole, the generator results in the emission of gamma photons from the surrounding elements, with each producing characteristic

energies. Those energies are digitized, identified and quantified, and sorted into a spectrum that describes the chemical composition of the formation.The data is automatically transferred wirelessly to KLS’s real-time operations center.

It’s a highly automated system with the operator remaining in the air-conditioned comfort of the Fuso, meaning zero manual handling.

“There are other safety advantages too,” Dent says. “On a mine site there are material risks and hazards that we’re always proactively identifying to keep people safe. These tools can provide essential structural, geotechnical information about, say, pit wall stability, and that informs safety decisions.”

Oresight isn’t Epiroc’s only tech showstopper. Later, Dent drives us to an adjacent suburb and pulls up at an unassuming tree-lined warehouse. In its driveway is a shipping container detailed in Epiroc’s – and now Corescan’s – yellow and grey livery.

Walking past the container into the warehouse proper, we’re faced with shelves of timber pallets stacked high towards the ceiling. Dent slides open a pallet to reveal trays of precisely labelled core samples, each a few inches in diameter.

They’ve been shipped to Perth for analysis by Corescan’s HCI. A team of technicians takes a tray and loads it through a front window of the container onto a three-axis translation table. It whirs into action and runs the tray under an array with three sensors – a 25-micron pixel resolution RGB camera, a 3D laser profiler, and an infrared spectrometer – to produce a detailed analysis of each core sample, with the results appearing on twin LCD screens at the end of the container.

It’s impressive stuff, even if HCI was first developed by Corescan in the early 2000s. But what once took 60 minutes now takes around five.

“People can make decisions quicker in greenfield exploration, but also maximize quality from a production standpoint,” Grant says.

“There are sheds around the world with core waiting to be processed. We have the ability now to get this pushed through very quickly. It pretty much comes out of the ground and you can get results.” 

THE FINAL PIECE in Epiroc’s new focus on exploration is Schramm. This company’s reputation in reverse circulation drilling by now speaks for itself and illustrates this round of acquisitions isn’t just about the cutting edge. Not that its workshop is any less impressive. Schramm's engineers are in the final stages of assembling a T685 crawler rig. In its signature bright red paint job, with an enormous mast and powerful deck-mounted diesel engine, it’s an imposing piece of kit ready for the wide range of environments the company operates in globally

“Schramm filled a hole for us with the reverse circulation market,” Grant says. “We’ve had a lot of customers say they’re pleased we’ve taken it on: it’s a great product, it integrates easily into our organization because it’s a drilling company, and it’s right in our wheelhouse. Epiroc can support existing and new rigs through our extensive aftermarket support network.”

BUT THIS NEW focus on exploration simply fits nicely into a wider Epiroc pivot toward a tech-driven future.

“AI is the next frontier,” Grant says. “That’s really why we want to move into exploration more, because we see a lot of opportunity for technology.

It’s exactly where we need to be.”

“We talk at Epiroc about a pit-to-port strategy,” Rossiter adds. “But this is really about extending that to an exploration-to-port strategy. That’s where the future lies.”