The challenges facing mineral exploration and mining continue to mount as much of the world has already been surveyed and fewer deposits are economically recoverable. In mineral exploration, there is only a 5% success rate in brownfield exploration, and just a 0.5% success rate in greenfield exploration. When you compare this to oil and gas exploration, which makes greater use of computer modeling, there is an 35% success rate, leaving lots of room for improvement in mineral exploration.

Advances in data collection and storage technologies have vastly increased the amount of data available to a geologist; however it has led to databases that are far too vast and complex for geologists to effectively or efficiently evaluate.

At Minerva, we believe that the use of AI can revolutionize how companies search for mineral deposits. That’s exactly why we created TERRA, our AI platform for mineral exploration. With TERRA, users can standardize their mining and exploration data to ensure interoperability, enabling them to find, share and use that data for more sophisticated analytics by either a human or through machine learning and reasoning.

TERRA can help solve the issues of unmanageable data volume, organization, and decision support. The platform is built on a foundation of carefully structured human knowledge which allows it to provide conclusions on a variety of problems that are not well suited to traditional machine learning techniques. While machine learning techniques have made strides in aspects of mining, they continue to struggle with exploration, as mineral deposits are rare and complex with many different attributes… making the outputs difficult to interpret and validate without expensive field work.

Minerva optimizes mineral deposit discovery and metallurgical research by combining AI technologies with geological modelling, exploratory data analysis, and unparalleled cloud computing power. This optimum combination of AI and bleeding-edge technologies allows our clients to find the best locations for exploration, to explain in detail why each location was identified, and to provide advice on what additional exploration information to look for.

Minerva’s technology has been used in a number of projects for government agencies focused on identifying public domain exploration targets to promote mining within their jurisdictions. In 2019 Minerva completed the Yukon Mineral Targets project, an interactive website that allows the user to evaluate targets and understand how they were generated. Minerva recently completed a project in Mexico, the results of which will be announced at PDAC in 2021.