The main objectives of NEXT are to develop innovative and sensitive exploration concepts and technologies, and to investigate and promote their acceptance by the society. This will be achieved by taking into account the following challenges for the EU economy and civil society:
- Economy related: Exploration at lowest possible costs and identification of new exploration targets
- Technology related: New and more sensitive exploration technologies and solutions
- Environment related: Reduction of the exploration footprint
- Society related: Improving awareness and trust of society to a sustainable raw materials exploration, ultimately targeting the safeguarding of existing employment and creating further new employment opportunities
- Policy related: Recommendations to feed the Raw Materials Strategic Implementation Plan.
Conclusions of the action
NEXT identified twenty-nine (29) exploitable results which are associated with various aspects related to mineral exploration, especially for the early phases, and can be attributed to a number of different categories and topics, such as:
• Geophysical technologies. Hard- and software developments and results verification
• Geochemistry, Mineralogy, and Mineral systems studies, methods, hard- and software development and verification
• Data fusion, processing and interpretation methods, software development and demonstration
• Education. Creating teaching and learning materials
• Clustering, Dissemination & Presentation
• Studies on social acceptance, and recommendations for improving company – community relations at the exploration stage
A key aspect that has been acknowledged also from the Advisory Board of NEXT is that the new technologies contribute to accelerating time to discovery of ore deposits. A key finding from the investigations on the cost savings is that while total exploration budgets follow market trends, the NEXT developments help to increase the exploration productivity – and consequently, this can reduce the number of drillings, which is the by far most expansive method in the exploration for an ore deposit. Further, reducing the number of drillholes, as well as the developed remote technologies (like the UAV geophysical surveys, the geochemical/mineralogical field measurement methods, and environmental remote sensing approach) and the methods to utilize existing and newly generated data (via machine learning/self-organizing maps (SOM)) address environmental concerns and can reduce environmental footprint, and may additionally improve the perception of exploration in Europe. This is also addressed by the research on the social license to explore concept, and practical advice is given to exploration companies with the published toolkit.
