Greenfields Exploration Ltd. will have its looming crowd-sourced competition results to find targets for its Greenland project assessed by a Center for Exploration Targeting doctorate student, which will be a new step for the mining industry, according to an independent geological expert who has placed third in similar competitions run by Integra Gold Corp. and Endomines AB.
The Perth, Australia-based junior will fly airborne geophysics and collect gravity, magnetic and radiometric data sets from the southern licenses at its Frontier project around August and September and should have the data in a usable format by October to start the competition to help find exploration targets. A student will then start a three-year doctorate analyzing the results.
Greenfields, which plans to list on the ASX in early 2019, will run another competition later from the remaining license areas, results of which will also feed back into the degree with the Center for Exploration Targeting, a collaboration between the University of Western Australia and Curtin University.
The drilling done as a result of the original targeting work will also feed back into the degree.
Perth-based X-plore Geoconsulting principal consultant Oliver Kreuzer, who prepared the independent technical assessment report for Greenfields' Frontier project published in April, will likely be a judge in the competition, having previously placed third in the aforementioned competitions run by Integra and Endomines.
Kreuzer told S&P Global Market Intelligence that Greenfields' approach was a novel and "exciting" innovation for the mining industry, and the overall package of what Greenfields Managing Director Jonathan Bell is trying to achieve has "never been tried or tested before."
Kreuzer said Greenfields securing a 12,975-square-kilometer landholding in a prospective, underexplored region then "looking at doing things in a different way" needs to be commended.
"Theoretically, you're tapping into a raft of different ideas than if you had engaged one or two single consultancy, which is a very positive aspect," he said of crowd-sourcing the data analysis on the project, which contains evidence of copper, cobalt, zinc, lead, tungsten, antimony and gold.
"The problem is Integra was so successful that it was taken over [by Eldorado Gold Corp. in 2017] and could not complete what they set out to do, so what Jon is proposing to do is still new and very novel, because none of the stuff that Integra has done internally has actually reached the public domain."
However, he also said such competitions "work best when there is a downturn on when people aren't engaged otherwise readily," citing the previous competitions, which were run during tougher times for industry.
Strong incentive needed
However, with market sentiment improving, skills shortages are returning across certain parts of Australia's mining sector, so Kreuzer suspects that Bell "might have to spend more on this than he's budgeted for" in the monetary prize to lure competitors.
Kreuzer said a C$1 million prize pool helped Integra lured many more participants to produce targets across its Lamaque project in Val-d'Or, Quebec, than when Endomines made available geological data from its Karelian Gold Line, also known as Pampalo a 40-kilometer-long gold prospective Archaean greenstone belt in Eastern Finland, but offered only about €80,000.
Bell told S&P Global Market Intelligence that a "big ticket item really goes into incentivizing the crowd. You have to put up a reasonable prize, otherwise people just won't compete, especially given that market is picking up."
While he could not compete for monetary prizes with the likes of Integra, there are other options such as offering scrip in his company and doing "things with shares."
Sponsoring a doctorate student could cost about A$150,000, compared to a A$2 million drilling program, Bell added.
