Rio Tinto offers Australian miners free laser tech for high quality bauxite

Global mining giant Rio Tinto plans to share their non-confidential laser mineral analysis technology free of cost with the upcoming exploration companies in Australia to facilitate the discovery of high quality mineral reserves in the country.

The technology was developed by geoscientists at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Ore Deposit Science (CODES) over the last decade, under the guidance of Professors David Cooke and Bruce Gemmell at the University of Tasmania, and was supported by AMIRA International research projects.

Rio Tinto was one of the companies that helped finance this research and it adapted the technology for its Bundoora Research laboratories in Melbourne, and has been testing it on its own mineral projects for the last two years.

The technology uses the changes in the concentration of trace elements in minerals to define the location of buried ore deposits. The technique has been tested by the CODES research team on many major deposits worldwide and shown to have a very high success rate for discovery.

The University of Tasmania’s ARC Centre has developed the most advanced laser ablation ICPMS labs in the world, and is the international leader in this field of research applied to exploration for ore deposits.

“The fact that Rio, one of the largest global miners, has comprehensively adopted the technology for its exploration programs and is now proposing to use this to assist junior companies to discover the next major ore deposit is testimony to the high quality and industry relevant research carried out at University of Tasmania,” Gemmell, the director of CODES, said.