How to create value and manage risks in exploration

Online training course given at PDAC 2022

The 3 hour training course at PDAC was jointly run by Graham Banks (Director of Route to Reserves and Southern Geoscience Consultants), Mike Samis (Director at SCM Decisions) and myself (Richard Schodde MinEx Consulting).

Each of us brought the following complementary skills to the task:

Graham works as an exploration geologist in both the petroleum and minerals industries and, as such, is uniquely positioned to transfer his learnings from the former to the latter.

Mike is the world-expert on the use of real-options and decision-trees for valuing exploration and mining projects.

My contribution was my deep experience on estimating discovery costs and probability of success at each stage of exploration and development

Key topics covered in the course were:

  • The need to re-frame how we define and measure value, risk and decision-making for exploration projects
  • The need to management to be comfortable with failure and large uncertainty ranges (most projects fail !!)
  • When it come to decisions about progressing an exploration project, The importance of using information to define the range of uncertainty in the data and then developing programs to test hypotheses / reduce uncertainty
  • Identifying and defining the various stages of exploration (at the Province, Regional and local scale)
  • Use of multi-period decision-trees to calculate the expected value of exploration and determine whether to “go” or “no-go”

Please contact me if you want to learn more about the course.