„MAP“ – New innovation project supported by EIT RawMaterials will provide better assessments of undiscovered mineral resources

Having a reliable information concerning the locations and the amounts of undiscovered mineral resources is important for investment decisions by exploration and mining companies and for the political and the administrative decision-making process concerning land-use planning.

The current state-of-the-art method for this purpose – the ‘three-part method’ – was developed by the U.S. Geological Survey. The method is based on the integration of expert evaluation and statistical data analysis. However, the three-part method has several shortcomings and requires quite a lot of manual work. For these reasons, the user base of the method and software has remained limited and mainly consists of a limited number of Geological Survey organisations.

The MAP project will now address the need for upgrading and enhancement of the whole assessment method, process and software. The new assessment process will be based on the integration of mineral prospectivity modelling (MPM) tools into the three-part method. The assessment process will be implemented in the new MAP software, which will guide the user through the whole assessment and ensure the smooth transfer of data from one part of the process to the next. The new software will produce quantitative probabilistic estimates of the total amount of metals in undiscovered mineral deposits of selected types in particular geologically defined areas (permissive tracts).

The developed process and software will be thoroughly tested in several countries and on the Arctic deep ocean floor. These tests will provide valuable new information on the locations and amounts of undiscovered mineral resources in these areas. Because the deployment of the new MAP software will increase knowledge of undiscovered mineral resources, it will help the industry to concentrate on the environmentally and socially most sustainable sources of raw materials. The produced MAP software will be freely available with open source code.

The members of the MAP project consortium are:

• Geological Survey of Finland (Lead Partner)
• Geological Survey of Sweden
• University of Oulu
• LTU Business AB
• Iceland GeoSurvey
• Geological Survey of Norway
• Norwegian University of Science and Technology
• U.S. Geological Survey
• Scandinavian Highlands
• Beak Consultants GmbH

The members of the consortium bring together representatives of research, higher education and business.

The kick-off meeting was held at the Geological Survey of Finland in Espoo from 9^th until 10^th January 2018.

On 22^nd March, a free Stakeholder Meeting will be held at the Park Inn Radisson Oslo Airport Hotel in Norway. The meeting is intended to get feedback from relevant stakeholders about how they do quantitative mineral resource assessments today, what kinds of results they find useful, and what future requirements they see for the methodology and software tools used, and for the results produced.

We invite interested parties to participate the meeting in Oslo to learn more about the project and to share their views. The meeting will be a workshop where the participants are organised in small groups to discuss a given/introduced topic.

In addition to this, an online questionnaire is available. We cordially invite you to participate the survey. Your feedback will allow us to develop a software platform for the present and the future!