Geological exploration for critical battery and industrial metals using Artificial Intelligence

For this Innovate Fast Start project, Optic Earth is developing a workflow to automate and augment the process of discovering economically viable deposits of metals critical to the Energy transition. These minerals (copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium and rare earth metals) are critical components of the net-zero supply chain and are used to make power infrastructure and batteries among a host of other manufactured products.

Today, mineral exploration consists of manual and isolated interpretation of geologic and geophysical data over small areas of land. This high-stakes process is often unsuccessful, with as few as 1% of exploration programs resulting in the discovery of an economic resource. The lack of investment in mineral exploration over the last two decades poses a significant risk to the supply of copper, battery, and other critical metals going forward, potentially delaying or impacting the net zero transition.

Our project aims to automate the process of generating new and economically viable mineral resources, accelerating the process of finding new deposits globally. By using artificial intelligence techniques, we will analyse large geological databases and remote sensing data (satellite images, geophysical data), over a large swathe of land. Using data mining, cutting-edge geophysical analysis techniques, and machine learning approaches, we will generate a suite of potential geological targets likely to contain economic concentrations of metals that may be taken forward by mining companies to develop. This project will create a code repository and demonstratable workflow that can be further developed and packaged up to discover mineral deposits around the world.

These outcomes and workflow of this project will be commercialised by selling insight or ready-to-go mineral projects to mining companies, supporting a growing technology business here in the UK.