The Hon. François-Philippe Champagne, visits Ideon Technologies in May 2023 to celebrate renewed funding for the Digital Technology Cluster program (through which Ideon leads an innovation consortium).
B.C.’s Ideon Technologies is supporting the global shift to clean energy by accelerating the transition to low-impact mining.
The global shift from fossil fuels to clean energy is driving innovation in one of society’s oldest industries, which is also one of Canada’s most significant economic sectors: mining. Critical minerals and metals (such as nickel, copper, cobalt, and lithium) are in high demand to facilitate the clean energy transition, with massive pressure on the mining industry to find billions of tons of resources over the coming decades to deploy technologies such as wind, solar, nuclear, and electrification.
By enabling more efficient, responsible, and low-impact mining, one Canadian company is enabling a smoother transition.
Adopting creative new approaches
In Canada alone, all new car sales will be electric by 2035, with the average electric vehicle requiring more than 150 kilograms of critical minerals to produce. The Canadian government recently released a national critical minerals strategy to address supply chain shortages and bolster mining as one of Canada’s most important economic sectors.
The fact is that there can be no clean energy transition without mining. For an industry so critical to our livelihoods, there’s no shortage of public critique, with perception rooted in historic practices. Mining companies currently rely heavily on drilling to try and understand the subsurface, using a hit-and-miss approach targeting poorly constrained geological anomalies. They often make billion-dollar decisions based on a small fraction of knowledge of what’s beneath the surface.
By enabling more efficient, responsible, and low-impact mining, one Canadian company is enabling a smoother transition to clean energy.
With global drilling volume at approximately 150 million metres per year, a fundamental shift in approach is required to realize substantial improvement in the sustainable production of critical mineral resources. The world’s largest mining companies are adopting creative new ways to access the Earth’s resources more efficiently, responsibly, and with as little impact on the environment and our communities as possible.
Unlocking subsurface potential
ancouver-based Ideon Technologies is at the forefront of this innovation, working with the world’s mining leaders to identify, map, and monitor mineral deposits in a more precise, less invasive way, and with a higher level of confidence than ever before.
Recently recognized with a Governor General’s Innovation Award, Ideon uses advanced particle physics to unlock subsurface potential by allowing mining companies to see clearly underground — in the same way that medical professionals use X-rays to view inside the human body. The Ideon subsurface intelligence platform harnesses the power of naturally occurring cosmic rays from supernova explosions in space, detecting, measuring, and analyzing sub-atomic particles to provide visibility down to one kilometre beneath the Earth’s surface.
Ideon is using this made-in-B.C. innovation to accelerate the world’s transition to low-impact mining. By enabling mining companies to see the unseen, Ideon delivers a high degree of subsurface certainty in an environment that has traditionally been very uncertain. This approach — now deployed around the world with leading mining innovators — helps companies confidently target high-recovery, low-waste deposits, and advance the sustainable supply chains needed to fuel the energy transition.
Learn more at ideon.ai.
This article was made possible with support from Ideon Technologies.
