Exploration conference an international success

More than 900 people from 77 countries converged on Toronto this week to attend Exploration ’87. Also known as the Third Decennial International Conference on Geophysical and Geochemical Exploration for Minerals and Groundwater, the conference provided a forum for exploration geologists and earth scientists from around to world to discuss and review the latest in mineral exploration developments. The sponsor of the international event was the Canadian Geoscience Council.

One of the undisputed deans of mineral exploration in the world today, Roy Woodall, delivered the inaugural address. Mr Woodall is director of exploration for Western Mining Corp in Australia. Speaking before a packed conference room of several hundred delegates, Mr Woodall examined several aspects of the changing exploration scene.

Mr Woodall stressed the need for the exploration community to improve its public image. The mining industry “must also tell the people what we are and what we do in a language they understand, in language which has color and excitement.” This, Mr Woodall explained, was required as few people “have any concept of how their standard of living would suffer without resource-based industries producing oil, gold, copper, lead, zinc, nickel and uranium.”

Mineral exploration is really research and development — a phrase, Mr Woodall said, which was understood by the general public. When including exploration as a research and development expenditure, most mining companies ranked extremely high when compared to percentage of sales spent on research by other non-mining industries. (As an example, Western Mining spends 10% of sales on such expenditures as compared to ibm Corp. which spends about 6.9%.)

Mr Woodall also chastised the popular belief that new mineral discoveries belong to the people. “The golden rule of fair dealing in our society is that an invention belongs to the inventor.” However, the discovery of mineral deposits, which are analogous to inventions, are deemed not to belong to the discoverers, but to the people. “How would these people feel if it was their time, their talents, their money and their life’s work which went into making those discoveries?” he queried.

In the face of such hostility, Mr Woodall argued that the industry “can only win the support of the majority through simple, wise argument. We are engaged in a battle for the minds of the people.”

Looking at the role of government in exploration, Mr Woodall emphasized that government should reward success, not expenditure — the latter being the case with flow-through financings in Canada. “I note with apprehension the very large sums of money being made available to Canadian explorers through flow-through financings. This initiative encourages expenditure and rewards expenditure not discovery. In Australia, the opposite is true, where the government foregoes corporate tax for those companies which are successful in exploration.”