With a variety of applications – including block caving, exploration and resource characterisation, heap leaching and stockpile monitoring – Canadian mining tech company Ideon Technologies’ REVEAL Platform helps customers accelerate and optimise the recovery of critical minerals, making it applicable across Africa’s growing critical minerals mine developments and interests, according to CEO Gary Agnew.

“The current approach, primarily using drilling to understand the subsurface, means the industry measures a tiny fraction of an orebody. Everything between those drillholes is interpolated, so we have a multimillion-dollar industry sitting on top of a very coarse understanding of the Earth’s subsurface,” he explains.

The Ideon REVEAL Platform enables mining companies to bridge the gaps between sparse biopsy-like datasets, producing a high-resolution, multi-dimensional volumetric model of the subsurface. Customers gain a high-fidelity view of the subsurface to better understand how to recover the ore at their sites safely, efficiently and with the least impact on the Earth.

To achieve this, Ideon combines the power of cosmic-ray muons – subatomic particles created by supernova explosions in space – with advanced geophysical sensing technologies, multi-physics data integration and AI-powered services.

The company generates high-resolution, high-velocity 3D models of the Earth’s subsurface, enabling mining companies to identify, map, characterise, monitor and extract orebodies faster, more efficiently and with greater confidence, thereby providing faster targeting, shorter development timelines, reduced operational risk and a smaller environmental footprint.

The opportunity presented by this technology, Agnew adds, is to transform mineral exploration from a “hit-or-miss, needle-in-a-haystack” process into a more targeted and informed approach. By accelerating the path from identifying the location of an orebody to understanding its characteristics and determining the optimal mining strategy, the technology has the potential to enhance operational efficiency and ultimately improve metal recovery from individual assets.

While Ideon has deployed, and continues to deploy, its technology in exploration, the company sees its biggest opportunity in existing Tier 1 and Tier 2 operating mines.

Ideon’s thesis is that the projected $12-billion shortfall in critical mineral supply by 2050 cannot be addressed through traditional greenfield exploration alone. With new discoveries typically taking 15 years to 20 years to advance from discovery to production, the industry will need faster, more efficient approaches to identifying and developing mineral resources to meet growing demand.

Instead, Ideon is focused on the “engine room” of critical mineral production: the world’s biggest and most significant mining assets. The company’s analysis indicates that the industry may be under-recovering mineral value equivalent to the output of six to eight Tier 1 copper mines a year.

From a commodity perspective, Ideon sees copper as the common denominator across the energy transition, AI data centre growth and the development of energy systems.

Agnew points to an expected yearly copper supply deficit of 30% by 2035.

Closing the Gap

While Ideon is involved in helping explorers map subsurface geology, it is not the predominant focus of the business, as the company would like to play a strategic role in helping close the growing critical minerals supply gap, says Agnew.

“In the context of an operating mine, we’re helping customers expand their resource with confidence. Instead of relying solely on infill drilling, they can now understand the geometry of the orebody and, in applications such as block cave monitoring, inform the efficient recovery of low-grade copper deposits at depth,” he explains.

When looking at the copper market, he highlights that mining companies have already discovered and recovered a significant portion of the copper that was readily available near the surface and, going forward, the challenge will be to unlock lower-grade copper situated at deeper depths underground.

This challenge has accelerated the adoption of advanced mining methods such as block caving. While block caving is a highly efficient mining system, Agnew notes that it has traditionally been difficult to fully understand the complex processes taking place in caves deep underground.

Companies can invest $10-billion or more upfront to develop a block cave operation, yet still have limited visibility into the complex and constantly evolving conditions unfolding in the subsurface. Understanding this dynamic mining environment remains one of the industry’s “greatest challenges”, he says.

What Ideon does, Agnew explains, is help customers see through hundreds of metres of solid rock to understand the dynamics of the block cave – how it is propagating, how it is performing and where potential safety risks exist.

“That enables operators to plan the efficient recovery of copper because they can make better production and extraction decisions based on a clearer understanding of how the rock and the cave are behaving beneath the surface,” he concludes.