Causes of Declining Innovation in Exploration

New mines now take nearly 18 years to go from discovery to first production. In the 1990s, it took just 6. That gap tells you everything about where the industry is today. The delays are everywhere. Permitting is slower. Financing is harder. Feasibility and construction get stuck in limbo. In the US, the average lead time is now over 19 years. Globally, it’s 15.5. And that’s just the average. Some projects are stretching to 30 or 40 years. Look at Donlin in Alaska, discovered in 1990, still not in production. Wafi-Golpu in Papua New Guinea has been stalled since 1990 too. Resolution in Arizona is still in limbo. Every project has its own mix of tribal, environmental, or regulatory hurdles. And every delay adds risk, cost, and uncertainty. This isn’t about bad geology. The resources are there. The challenge is everything that comes after the drill hits ore. Even after a positive feasibility study, it can take a decade to move. In some cases, the process stalls completely if political winds shift. If we want new supply, the timelines need to come down. Not by cutting corners, but by clearing bottlenecks. Exploration is already high-risk. If development becomes a multi-decade gamble, fewer will play. #Mining #Exploration #Development #Permitting #Metals #Copper Sources: https://lnkd.in/gVMDz9Gf https://www.harmony.co.za https://www.novagold.com

Sometimes the best insights come from your own community. A veteran explorer with 40 years of experience left this comment on my recent post about where all the explorers have gone. "Over the past decade we haven’t just lost wells; we’ve lost people, cultures, data, and organizational memory. That capability cannot be rebuilt with a budget cycle. It’s developed over decades of learning, failure, and disciplined risk-taking, and once dispersed, it takes years to restore. Holding acreage is not the same as exploring, and without drilling, skills and prospect inventories stagnate. We underinvested in the next generation, and capital discipline drifted into capital avoidance. What raises the stakes today is the shifting demand picture. AI-driven electricity growth is pushing grids to revise forecasts upward, adding, not replacing hydrocarbon demand because firm power still depends heavily on gas. Wind and solar are vital, but without large-scale storage and system flexibility, they cannot eliminate the need for energy supplied by exploration. So the mismatch grows: increasing demand for reliable energy, yet fewer companies capable of delivering new high-impact discoveries. The real question now is how we make exploration viable and attractive part of the energy transition mix again." That comment really got me thinking. Exploration capability is like your health. You can't buy it when you need it. You build it daily or lose it completely. You can't hire your way back to exploration excellence when oil hits $100. You can't download decades of pattern recognition. You can't purchase the knowledge that comes from drilling dry holes and learning why. Exploration didn't get reduced by accident. It lost the internal capital competition to short-cycle shale, buybacks, and energy transition optics. Sometimes the most valuable perspectives come from those still in the trenches, watching the capability gap widen in real time. This comment reminded me why I write about these issues. The world is going to need more energy from all sources and it's still going to need great minds to find it.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗸𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗳 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Europe’s laboratories, lecture halls and inventors are increasingly feeling the chill of politics. Laboratories are quieter, patent filings slower, and the steady pulse of scientific publication is losing tempo. This decline is not merely the result of tightening budgets or bureaucratic fatigue. It is, at its core, political. As #populism and #extremism advance across the continent, distrust of expertise, international cooperation, and the very legitimacy of #science has begun to reshape the conditions under which #knowledge is produced. Governments sensitive to such moods divert funds from #research towards ideological battles. #Universities and research institutes face suspicion; international scientific partnerships are painted as compromises of sovereignty. What was once a shared pursuit of truth becomes a theatre of cultural contention. Over time, confidence wanes, talent migrates, and innovation —particularly in #climate and #green #technologies— stagnates. In a recent 𝘙𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 𝘗𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘺 article, my co-authors —ZHUOYING YOU and Peter Teirlinck— and I demonstrate how this trend takes measurable form. Drawing on data from 1,137 EU regions, we find that where support for extreme parties, right and left, rises, research output and technological #innovation fall, most sharply in green sectors. The link is especially strong for the far right, whose platforms often question the legitimacy of climate science and the purpose of public R&D #investment. The deeper concern is cultural. The erosion of trust in expertise corrodes the social foundations of innovation. Europe’s competitiveness, its #GreenTransition, and indeed its democratic resilience depend on addressing this climate of suspicion. Science cannot thrive in a polity that doubts its own need for discovery. Full article available in 𝘙𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 𝘗𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘺, Vol. 54 (2025), 105307 DOI: https://lnkd.in/e35YPVFi

We are witnessing a catastrophic structural failure in our innovation ecosystem because we incentivise the hoarding of knowledge rather than its application. We have mastered the science of discovery, yet we are failing the science of delivery because we operate under the dangerous illusion that innovation ends when the findings are peer-reviewed. This mindset has created a vast graveyard of potential breakthroughs that never survived the journey from the sterile safety of the laboratory to the messy complexity of the real world, primarily because we pour millions into digging the well of knowledge but invest mere pennies in the plumbing required to get that water to the thirsty. We must treat translation as a primary discipline, equal to the research itself, to achieve true impact. We must stop overengineering the discovery phase while underdesigning the delivery mechanism, and we must acknowledge that insight without a robust implementation strategy is just overhead. The metric of success must shift from how many papers we publish to how many lives we actually improve through rigorous execution. To get a real return on our lab investment, we must spend more than pennies on the bridge to society.

Minerals are getting harder to find. Soon, we might drill as deep as the Kola Superdeep Borehole. The 12-kilometre Soviet scientific project that remains humanity's deepest penetration of the Earth's crust. Jokes aside, the easy deposits have been found, and the difficult ones are proving costlier than anyone anticipated. The average depth of gold discovery stands at just ~56 metres. For base metals, the figure is 193 metres. The rate of progression offers little comfort: gold discoveries are deepening by 11 metres per decade, base metals by 28 metres. Modern exploration is under strain. Between 1979 and 2005, the average cost of making a significant mineral discovery hovered around $53m to $86m. By 2015, that figure had ballooned to $248m, and it remains elevated at ~ $190m today. The China-driven commodity boom of 2005 to 2012 saw global exploration expenditure increase tenfold, yet the number of discoveries merely doubled. Technology, the industry's saviour, has delivered 80 significant innovations since the 1940s, from airborne electromagnetics to passive seismic tomography. Each has improved efficiency incrementally. Each benefit has been eroded by the increasing difficulty of exploring deeper terrain. The latest candidate for transformation, AI and machine learning, confronts a fundamental constraint: these tools require dense three-dimensional drilling data to function effectively. Greenfield projects at frontier depths lack such data by definition. Current geophysical methods lose effectiveness below 500 metres. Beyond that threshold, the primary discovery technique becomes extrapolation from known ore, which is to say drilling extensions of deposits already found. The percentage of discoveries qualifying as world-class has remained stubbornly flat at 1%-3.5% since the 1970s, regardless of technological advancement. The industry finds roughly two such deposits annually. Consolidation through mega-mergers may secure individual companies' access to copper or gold, but as the size of the pie does not change, only the slice. What will actually move the needle is less glamorous. The data point toward three productive frontiers: 1) covered regions adjacent to known high-grade deposits, where geochemistry and geophysics still function; 2) brownfield extensions of existing mines, where accumulated drilling data finally enables machine learning to identify targets that human geologists overlooked; 3) and underexplored jurisdictions in Africa and Latin America, where average discovery depths remain shallow, and surface prospecting retains relevance. The technologies gaining traction align with these realities. Passive seismic imaging, gravity gradiometry, predictive analytics, and portable geochemical analysers, you name it. Some of these advances may squeeze considerably more discovery from the upper few hundred metres of crust, which is where the economics of extraction still function.

Mining's investment cycles block technology adoption. A single ultra-class haul truck costs millions, and a fleet purchase can reach nine figures. These assets get depreciated over five to seven years, but the actual productive life often stretches to a decade or longer. During that window, whatever technology was baked into the purchase decision is what the operation lives with. The operating costs compound the lock-in further, with fuel representing the majority of an engine's lifecycle costs. When a mine has already committed to those expenditure profiles, the appetite to layer additional capital for new technology on top becomes extremely limited. This would be manageable if capital flowed steadily, but it doesn't. Mining capex tracks commodity prices with remarkable correlation. When prices are high, miners rush to expand. When prices fall, capital dries up. So the window in which a mine has both the money and the corporate willingness to invest in new technology is narrow and unpredictable, and it almost never aligns with the moment a given technology reaches commercial maturity. Innovation in the sector rises during price booms and collapses during recessions, tracking long cycles specifically. The greenfield bias makes this worse. Large-scale technology changes land at new mines first, because that is where the design can accommodate them from the start. Retrofitting existing operations introduces mechanical complexity and integration challenges that most brownfield sites cannot absorb mid-cycle. Most operating mines run mixed fleets assembled over decades, with multiple brands and generations, and the practical reality is that transformative technology becomes something to consider after a full fleet renewal rather than a tool applied to existing assets. And even phased, incremental approaches are constrained by the commodity cycle. During margin pressure, only technologies with rapid payback survive the approval process. More transformative investments wait for the next upcycle, by which point the technology may have shifted again. The result is a permanently lagging adoption curve, because the financial structure won't accommodate new tech. The industry is slow because downtime costs thousands per hour, because major projects overrun on cost and schedule, and because the capital structures that govern mining make experimentation extraordinarily expensive.  We think the way through this is a solution that sits on top of whatever a mine already owns. Not replacing the fleet, not ripping out the control systems, not asking for a greenfield budget on a brownfield operation. A system that connects to the equipment and data sources already running on site and starts delivering operational value within the existing capex envelope rather than demanding a new one. That’s how the conversation stops being about whether a mine can afford to adopt new technology and starts being about whether it can afford not to.

“If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.” - Jack Welch In evolution, decline doesn’t happen all at once—it creeps in, one small mutation at a time. Muller’s Ratchet describes how harmful mutations gradually accumulate when there’s no way to remove them, slowly weakening a species until it can no longer adapt. The ratchet effect is a concept in sociology and economics illustrating the difficulty with reversing a course of action once a specific thing has occurred, analogous with the mechanical ratchet that allows movement in one direction and seizes or tightens in the opposite. The concept has been applied to multiple fields of study and is related to the phenomena of scope creep, mission creep, and feature creep. The same thing happens to organisations. What starts as small, seemingly harmless optimisations—cost-cutting, rigid processes, a focus on efficiency over exploration—gradually erodes adaptability. Innovation is deprioritised, risk-taking is eliminated, and creative thinkers leave or are squeezed (frustrated) out. By the time change is unavoidable, it’s too late. Like an organism trapped in outdated DNA, the company’s internal structure and mindset become a straitjacket. The deeper this genetic drift toward efficiency sets in, the harder it becomes to change course. A company optimized for efficiency is like an organism perfectly tuned to its environment—thriving, but only as long as nothing changes. Gerald Heard, in The Source of Civilization (1937), put it as follows (and thank you Scott Wolf for the quote): “A creature which has become perfectly adapted to its environment, an animal whose whole capacity and vital force is concentrated and expended in succeeding here and now, has nothing left over with which to respond to any radical change.” The more an organization perfects the system, the more rigid it becomes. Some of you know this first-hand. You work for—or worked for—an organisation that once thrived on innovation, risk-taking, and long-term vision. But over time, the golden handcuffs tightened. Many organisations start with bold, values-driven leaders who balance efficiency with reinvention. Under them, the company’s DNA is rich with creativity and adaptability. Then, leadership changes. The new generation optimises for short-term gains—cutting costs, streamlining processes, and prioritising efficiency over exploration. Metrics replace meaning. Profit outweighs people. At first, it looks like success—costs are down, shareholder returns are up. But something vital is lost. The DNA that once embraced curiosity and reinvention erodes. Employees stop experimenting. New technologies are only used for incremental efficiency—not transformation. By the time the need for reinvention is obvious, the organisation is too rigid to adapt. #ThursdayThoughts #OrganizationalCulture #Reinvention

𝗢𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝟯% 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗜𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘆. Three years ago, it was 20%. In the same survey, 83% of executives say innovation is a top or top-three priority. That’s the paradox: innovation has never been more strategically declared – and never been less structurally enabled. The decline didn't happen because innovation stopped. It happened because organisations pushed it into safe mode. I’m seeing three recurring patterns in the market: ↳ Innovation teams that are told to wait for the next strategy cycle before they can act. ↳ Innovation rebranded into “Strategic Projects” with a mandate to optimise, not to explore. ↳ And innovation theatre – a high volume of initiatives, none of them with real exposure to uncertainty. That’s how you end up with companies proudly reporting innovation activity while structurally disabling innovation readiness. If innovation isn’t anchored as a defined role in the strategic system, it defaults to theatre. No lab, no framework and no budget line will change that. Innovation needs a clear mandate inside the operating architecture, not a side space with symbolic freedom. It needs a working contract between leadership, business units and the innovation function, so that ownership replaces sponsorship. And it needs an operating rhythm that enables movement before the next strategy cycle is formalised. 3% is not a statistic. It’s a system failure.

Profits doubled, Y/Y revenues were up 20%, costs were lower, and the product’s price was at an all-time high. Yet, the share price of the world’s largest gold miner was down. Lower ore production (down 15%) and lower ore grade plus increased future capex weighed on investors. The issues are not, and will not be, specific to one company. Ore degradation and limited supply seem endemic across mining. Copper and iron ore have both experienced quality degradation. Copper’s average grade declined by 40% since the ‘90s. And on January 2, 2026, at least two Iron Ore benchmarks (used to trade iron ore) will lower their iron ore purity content. Alumina, silica and other minerals are also experiencing decreases in purity. The product is getting worse and harder to find. For example, despite higher prices, no new major gold discoveries have been made in the last 2 years. 70% of the world’s copper was discovered in the ‘90s with zero discoveries in ’22 and ’23. Discoveries are also on average 35% smaller. Despite that, exploration budgets decreased by 15% in ‘23 and an additional 7% in ‘24 per S&P. Smaller and less frequent discoveries means reliance on brownfield projects with increasing depth and complexity, i.e. higher costs. It also means continued reliance on highly concentrated supply chains. At the same time, the demand for more metals and minerals will only increase from here. The industry’s solution seems to be to super-size it. M&A activity in the last 2 years has set a 20-year record. The oil industry also went through that in the late 90s and early 00s when oil behemoths were created and right before oil surged in price. Yet, those mergers do not create ore nor solve concentration risks. They may just lower the costs of already depleting assets (potentially good for shareholders). The solution instead might be in pursuing new, albeit smaller, discoveries outside existing supplies. Per McKinsey, 62% of copper, 44% of rare earths and 36% of lithium exist in jurisdictions outside those of the top three producers. But dispersion requires capital, technology and better legal frameworks. New money will require higher prices- copper, nickel and lithium prices must be 19%,16% and 36% higher than 2024 prices to spur additional investments. Technologies such as direct lithium extraction and new leaching technologies should lower costs and increase supply. But streamlining the permitting process is key. It now takes 18 years to bring a mine online (~30 years for some) and antiquated laws don’t help. The US, for example, operates under a general mining law first enacted in - wait for it - 1872. Upgrading these laws should allow for faster, higher and cheaper production. Our modern economy increasingly demands these materials. Producing them will require ~$5 trillion over the next 10 years. Smaller dispersed production could bridge demand, but more work and more capital is required. PS: Not AI content. Not investment advice.

"The Death of Curiosity": There is a steady decline of curiosity-driven learning and exploration in our society. Factors contributing to the death of curiosity: 1.Standardized education: The emphasis on standardized testing and rote learning can stifle curiosity and creativity. 2.Information overload: The ease of access to information through technology can make people less inclined to explore and discover new things. 3.Fear of failure: The pressure to succeed and avoid failure can discourage people from taking risks and exploring new ideas. 4.Social media: The constant stream of information on social media can lead to a superficial understanding of topics, rather than encouraging in-depth exploration. Consequences: 1.Lack of innovation: Without curiosity, we may miss out on new ideas and innovations that can drive progress. 2. Narrow perspectives: The death of curiosity can lead to a lack of understanding and empathy for different perspectives and cultures. 3.Disengagement: A lack of curiosity can result in disengagement and boredom, leading to a lack of motivation and purpose. Reviving curiosity: 1. Encourage exploration: Provide opportunities for people to explore and discover new things, without fear of failure. 2. Ask open-ended questions: Encourage critical thinking and curiosity by asking open-ended questions that promote exploration and discussion. 3. Emphasize lifelong learning: Foster a culture of lifelong learning, where people are encouraged to continue exploring and learning throughout their lives. 4. Model curiosity: Leaders and educators should model curiosity themselves, demonstrating the value of exploration and discovery. Let us be curious to nurture creativity!