Power Nickel, one of Canada’s leading metal exploration companies, has expanded its use of Fleet Space’s end-to-end mineral exploration solution, ExoSphere, to drive new geological understanding of its projects along Chile’s Atacama Fault System.
With deployments across Power Nickel’s Zulema, Palo Negro and Tierra de Oro projects, ExoSphere identified significant faulting in all three areas in addition to new insights about geological structures and geophysical anomalies in the region. The results have enhanced Power Nickel’s targeting with extensive 3D mapping of their properties in the heart of Chile’s Atacama Desert, Fleet Space says.
“Deployments of ExoSphere in Chile’s copper belt and the world’s most prolific copper producing regions is yielding compounding geological insight into the mineral systems that underpin the formation of these deposits,” Flavia Tata Nardini, CEO & Co-Founder of Fleet Space Technologies, said. “The speed, depth and cross-scale capability of ExoSphere’s real-time 3D subsurface imaging is not only enhancing the geological understanding of major copper regions in isolation, but also the commonalities between them. This is rapidly accelerating mineral systems knowledge and delivering a more holistic geological context needed to scale and enhance the success rates of data-driven copper exploration globally.”
Power Nickel’s development of its NISK project in Quebec, Canada, has paved the way for the company to apply similar strategies, operations and advanced technologies to unlock the exploration potential of 50,000 acres (20,234 ha) of the company’s projects across Chile’s copper belt. On their journey to build the NISK project into the world’s first carbon-neutral polymetallic mine, Power Nickel maintains a rigorous standard for the exploration techniques it deploys, ensuring they align with the company’s ESG charter and ambitious exploration timelines. This led the company to use the real-time 3D mapping capabilities of ExoSphere at NISK to enhance exploration outcomes and unlock sustainability benefits across their operation, identifying several new targets as a result.
“The simplified end-to-end data journey enabled by ExoSphere’s real-time 3D subsurface data acquisition, satellite-enabled data processing and rapid delivery of targeting insights has taken our data-driven exploration strategies to new heights while also delivering more sustainable outcomes pivotal to our company’s mission,” Power Nickel CEO, Terry Lynch, says. “Learning from our deployments at NISK, we are applying these powerful new technologies to unlock efficiencies and identify targets at unprecedented speed, scale, and depth across our Chile portfolio to stay at the forefront of advances in global copper exploration.”
Power Nickel and Fleet Space understand the fundamental role of mineral systems thinking and structural architecture in copper exploration, they say.
ExoSphere’s unique ability to image structures from the large-scale to the tenement and deposit-scale in 3D makes it highly useful for mapping crustal architecture: a critical part of all copper exploration programs, Fleet Space says.
The deployment of ExoSphere on Power Nickel’s projects in Chile builds on the rapid global adoption for Fleet Space’s solution among top exploration companies operating in many of the world’s leading copper regions.
