Last month GSQ hosted a two-day Technical Workshop in Townsville with approximately 100 people taking part each day (70 in person, 30 online).

Thirty talks were presented by various GSQ staff, academic collaborators and industry.

The Workshop formed part of an ongoing program of industry engagement and knowledge transfer, to share learnings and insights with industry and mineral explorers.

The agenda covered a wide variety of topics and GSQ sponsored works, from big-picture regional geophysics programs through to very detailed deposit level works. Thirty speakers from GSQ and other Georesources business units, together with collaborators from academia and industry provided updates and insights from a range of deposits and work programs.

Over recent years, one area of particular interest of GSQ has been to better understand the “secondary prospectivity” of mines wastes, tailings, low grade ores, and even coal-fired power station fly-ash. It’s an area of growing national and international interest, as reflected in work underway with the Japanese resource security agency JOGMEC on sourcing cobalt from copper ore tailings. Interestingly, some of the highest occurrences of critical minerals vanadium, scandium and rare earths occur in the fly-ash of the former Swanbank power station near Ipswich.

GSQ’s Workshop was preceded by a Strategic Planning Workshop facilitated by James Cook University Workshop which comprised industry explorers to help identify areas of exploration research and interest into the future.

GSQ continues to operate this co-design and collaborative engagement approach to ensure our work programs support the evolving needs of industry.