Having successfully completed the acquisition of scanning and data innovator Minalyze, artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics company Veracio is poised to transform the way the mining and exploration industry captures, analyses and interprets geological information, thereby evolving decision-making processes in an increasingly complex and data-driven world.

The $29.3-million deal will see the combining of a unique combination of Veracio’s AI and advanced analytics solutions and Minalyze’s geological data visualisation technology to offer minerals explorers advanced solutions, some of which are intended to better align with the current surge in demand for critical minerals and the industry’s pressing need to shorten the gap between discovery and mineral extraction.

Veracio offers the innovative infield drill sample scanning system TruScan, which was named as the Mining Innovation of the Year at the Mines and Money conference in London, held in December 2022.

The TruScan system offers a multitude of benefits to the exploration and mining industries, including providing remote access to an orebody in a quick and efficient manner, enabling mining companies to spend less time “blindly” drilling and more time analysing geological data and creating more useful resource information, according to Veracio chief innovation officer Mike Ravella.

He explains that “highly sophisticated technologies”, such as TruScan, which employs a combination of modern sensing with unique AI and software, will enable the delivery of information beyond what humans can acquire through traditional means.

Ravella notes that modern, digital geology technologies enable an acceleration in the finding and mining of orebodies, but that “at the end of the day, nowhere near enough” mining of critical minerals is happening at present to supply the minerals needed for decarbonisation technologies.

He explains that digital technologies, AI, advanced analytics and software are accelerating the process of defining ore bodies, from discovery, to resource, to reserve.

He points outs further that this is generating valuable data at the point of processing such minerals, thereby speeding up the processes between the stages of minerals exploration, project development and the actual mining of a resource.

Ravella elaborates that the future of mineral exploration and mining will be heavily loaded with data and will, increasingly, rely upon greater degrees of computing power, AI and advanced analytics.

He explains that the mining industry has spent decades optimising data for human consumption and that Veracio finds itself at the forefront of optimising this data specifically for AI.

He adds that the amount of data and information Veracio will have about the Earth’s resources will be far greater than what has been seen before as a result of the digital technologies that Veracio is developing.

“Collecting a bunch of data and not being able to process it offers zero value. It is important that we build environments that will allow us to handle large quantities of data while deriving data about the Earth beyond what we know today,” he states.

Ravella explains that being able to deliver a more in-depth interpretation of data, efficiently, presents greater value to explorers and developers, as, in the past, it took many months to process large volumes of data, thereby providing delayed results with little value.

He elaborates that, generally, vast amounts of mined material far outweigh the valuable minerals they present at the end of the processing stage, but that if a high definition of an orebody can be obtained through digital sensing technologies and AI, mining could be done differently in the future to create less tailings.

In addition, having the ability to more rapidly define a resource could speed up permitting processes and enable the extraction of more resources, notes Ravella.