GSWA Record 2017/6 TARGET 2017, Perth, Australia: Abstracts 145 The future(s) of minerals exploration by John P Sykes 1,2* , Allan Trench 1,3,4 and T Campbell McCuaig 1,5 1 Centre for Exploration Targeting, School of Earth and Environment, The University of Western Australia 2 Greenields Research Ltd., United Kingdom 3 Business School, The University of Western Australia 4 CRU Group Ltd., United Kingdom 5 BHP Billiton, Australia * Corresponding author: john.sykes@research.uwa.edu.au For a mineral resource to become a mine, not only must a geological discovery be made, the deposit must also prove economically viable, and environmentally and socio- politically accessible (Sykes and Trench, 2014a,b; Sykes, 2015a), as represented in Figure 1. Explorers should therefore aim to ind ‘undiscovered accessible reserves’. The inherent complexity and uncertainty surrounding the future means it is not possible to predict exactly what the nature of ‘undiscovered accessible reserves’ will be several decades into the future. One suggestion is that explorers should therefore aim to develop ‘multiple working hypotheses’ (Chamberlin, 1890) about the future of mining to appropriately process this complexity and uncertainty. More speciically, it is suggested that they should develop ‘multiple hypothetical reserves’, as represented in Figure 2 — different ideas about currently undiscovered mineral accumulations that could extractable in the future (Sykes and Trench, 2014a; Sykes, 2015a). The Centre for Exploration Targeting ‘Future of Minerals Exploration’ scenarios program was launched with the aim of developing the idea of ‘multiple hypothetical reserves’ using the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach (Ramirez and Wilkinson, 2016). The initial results of the program are summarised below. Stage 1: testing industry adaptivity The irst stage aimed to develop a range of scenarios about the future of copper mining and then compare them to the leading copper mines and projects and their owners to determine how well the industry could adapt to multiple plausible, yet very different, futures (Sykes, 2015b; Sykes and Trench, 2015a,b,c,d; Sykes and Trench, 2016e; Trench and Sykes, 2016). Two axes representing two key strategic levers for industry framed the scenarios: 1. Short-term margin optimisation: representing the battle between the industry’s technical capabilities and asset decline. Margins are either increasing or decreasing. Margin optimisation represents the short- run future of the industry (Maxwell, 2013). 2. Long-term idea space generation: this represents all that is unknown and yet to be discovered about the industry but will nonetheless have a major impact in the very long-run future (Maxwell, 2013). The idea space is either expanding or contracting. Four scenarios represented the end members of these axes, summarised in Figure 3 and below: • Under Siege: poor short-term performance leads to a lack of investment in the long-term, with few new ideas generated. The industry goes into decline (Sykes and Trench, 2015a; Trench and Sykes, 2016). Figure 1. A categorisation of discovered and undiscovered mineral resources modified from Sykes and Trench (2014a) Figure 2. The concept of ‘multiple hypothetical reserves’ based on Chamberlin’s (1890) ‘multiple working hypotheses’ (Chamberlin, 1890) modified from Sykes and Trench (2014a)