Why Prospect for minerals?
The increase in needs is due to:
- an increment in world population
- an increment in the needs of the world population
Causing a growth in production or re-launching research.
At the same time, the development of technology creates new needs. For example: the development and function of fuel & combustion vehicles are oil by products, has brought about the need of stronger alloys, which can be possible thanks to prospecting of new minerals (antimony, cadmium, chromo, nickel) and oil.
All of this makes up the mining economic cycle.
To begin with we’ll give the example of the first mineral used by man: Silex or Flint (a cryptocrystalline variety of Si02).
The origin; a prehistoric man, more attentive than others, accidentally discovered the properties of flint and the advantages over wood, including the hard mass hardened by fire: harder, minimal wearing, sharp cutting angles, etc ..
Beginning:
- The first hand exploitation of the mineral. And use of it giving superiority to those still using weapons made out of wood.
- Commerce with the barter or trading system; with the increase of demand the price would increase.
- Protection of the deposit from envious rivals: the owner protects his goods & and must use hand labor for the extraction and others for the distribution of ds.
Thus starting an embryo of capitalist society (boss, employee, currency exchange, the concept of paid labor).
Competition begins: through “industrial espionage” others tryout flint and begin “prospecting”. Another deposit is found… causing prices to decrease, everyone has their own flint.
This competition brings about:
- Associations among miners (the strong control the weak).
- Strong competitions between extractors, prices fall.
How can the market be protected when everyone knows where and how to find flint?
It can be done by: increasing production and/or lowering the price or improving the product.
How?: discovering that flint can be cut by hand or with fire.
Of which: refining = cutting flint. These were the first cases of mineral evaluation.
So: process industrialization with the creation of cutting workshops, putting on the market a finished product (arrow heads, axes, knives, etc.).
But this increases both the need and demand. Continuing in the search of more deposit through prospecting & the cycle finishes.
All of this continued until one of them by mistake, the flint for iron and smelted it discovering new characteristics and the source. Thus beginning a new cycle, leaving the old system behind, creating the need of an economic conversion by the flint miners.
At present a good mining research is always addressed to a rational relation between risk & projected profit. It is not an easy thing to analyze since each phase needs meticulous examination of technical, economic & financial information.
In light of all of this; risk and defining expectations must be evaluated. It must be decided to continue with the search or not, and in the first case, define a new objective & consider the needed means to reach them. While you advance, these decisions will be greater and more risky when passing to the next phase without a good evaluation of the prior phase.
The biggest financial losses are not normally at the exploration phase, but the evaluation phase, where it is being analyzed if it’s profitable or not, once investments have been made based on incomplete geological studies.
The decision of considering an indication as a “TARGET” is less critical than that of considering a “deposit” a badly studied “target” (“target” is the name given to a place that will be studied and is considered as a potential deposit).
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