Innovation in Geology

Celebrating its 25th anniversary, Val d’Or-based Géophysique TMC noticed a similarly abrupt shift in demand from its traditional customer base, despite a strong gold price. Gabriel McCrory, co-owner, recalled: “We are experiencing low demand from the gold sector, which is surprising as gold price is still high on the markets and there are plenty of territories that still need to be explored, but most investments are currently going into critical minerals.”

As IP resistivity remains a preferred choice for gold projects, electromagnetics has been more frequently used for critical minerals. Looking for lithium pegmatites is different than digging for gold. Different mineral signatures cropping up in a province that has built its fame on gold call for adaptation, learning, and innovating for geology companies to continue attracting new projects. As put by IOS’ Réjean Girard: “All (future-facing) metals occur in a wide spectrum of deposit types that have diverse signatures that require a bunch of new techniques: there are no geophysics techniques to detect lithium, so you need geochemistry and satellite images. It is a total change in modus operandi here, and this is a whole learning curve for the industry.”

Leveraging some of the best mining programs in the world at McGill or UQAT, the private-academia relationship, one that too often saw the latter being constrained to the ivory towers of Montréal and Abitibi-Témiscamingue, is a growing factor in Québec’s growing innovation successes. Corem is a non-profit company assisting mining firms in their R&D efforts, and president and CEO Francis Fournier detailed: “Research is a tool to develop and deliver innovation, and academia and research institutions have to partner with industry to de-risk technologies and validate performance.”

Nadine Veillette seconded those comments: “Collaboration with educational institutions allows us to integrate artificial intelligence into our processing, further enhancing our capabilities.”

Across the value chain, a million-ounce gold producer, a geologist, or an investment banker will tell you the same: Québec leads Canada in technology adoption in the geophysics and geoscientific realms.

Québec Precious Metals (QPM) is an example of a company using ALS GoldSpot’s AI tools to enhance exploration efforts: using AI to analyze information and identify target areas led to the discovery of two new areas at the Elmer East project. Mira Geoscience has been working on finding lithium targets in James Bay and recently developed the Geoscience ANALYST platform for the exploration community. The firm has been pushing for the use of the software at the university level, the solution being the only free data-science, AI-enabling geoscientific platform, with powerful visualization, open-source data structure, and open-source Python API. Jean-Philippe Paiement, director of global consulting, shared his vision: “We want to enable the next generation of geoscientists to have access to the latest technology. In Québec, technology adoption has been better than in other jurisdictions in Canada. There is a great deal of education involved.”

In conclusion, the forecast is encouraging for Québec’s geologists, geochemists, and geoscientists. The push toward critical minerals is redefining geological approaches and techniques, and driving exponential growth for that segment of the industry. But geologists in Québec know from decades of experience that in mining, nothing is certain, nor do bull markets last forever. Undoubtedly, the potential for sodium-ion batteries to challenge lithium-made ones will be on these firms’ radars in the next months. Abitibi Geophysics’ Nadine Veillette explained: “Maintaining diversification is crucial in the mining industry due to its cyclical nature. While lithium may currently be in high demand, we cannot predict what will happen in the next five to 10 years.”