Bluecap: A geospatial model to assess regional economic-viability for mineral resource development

摘要

Frontier mineral exploration is often exclusively focused on assessing geological potential without consideration for the economic viability of resource development. This strategy may overlook potentially prosperous zones for more geologically-favoured but financially-disadvantageous regions, or conversely, may introduce implicit biases against potential developments without due regard to underlying economies of scale or proximity to infrastructure. Accordingly, in this paper, we introduce a numerical model aimed at identifying economic fairways, i. e. areas permissive to mineral development from an economic perspective. The model, Bluecap, combines large-scale infrastructure and geological datasets to conduct geospatial analysis of the economic-viability of mining operations across Australia.