BC announces largest geoscience projects ever

Vancouver — The pine beetle is ravaging the forests of B.C. to such an extent that the provincial government is spending $400 million over just two years to battle the bug, both trying to slow its spread and finding ways to care for forestry-dependent towns left in the lurch.

But geoscientists across B.C. are seeing the beetle battle as a perfect opportunity for mineral exploration, and in mid-June the Ministry of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources joined forces with Geoscience BC and Natural Resources Canada (NRC) in announcing two major projects that, together, will be responsible for $11-million worth of mineral and oil exploration in beetle-ravaged regions of the province.

Each of the projects alone would stand as the single largest public geoscience project in B.C.’s history.

In early June, Gary Lunn, Minister of Natural Resources, announced that the latest $39-million installment of pine beetle funding included $6 million for NRC to conduct energy and mineral surveys in affected areas. Carmel Lowe, associate director of the Geological Survey of Canada’s Pacific Division, developed the NRC project.

“Geoscience survey data is the foundation — it’s what industry needs to get out of the starting blocks and do effective exploration,” Lowe says. “We’re confident there are mineral deposits in the area, and we hope that industry will take up our data in directing their exploration investment.”

The NRC project area stretches from Prince George south to Kamloops, a region that Lowe believes has been underexplored because of thick overburden and poor access. In exploring the region, Lowe’s team will employ a number of methods. Airborne radiometric and magnetic survey data will be collected for large segments of the region. A seismic survey is in the works, and in areas where seismic surveying is ineffective researchers will instead collect ground-based magneto-telluric data. The final component is till sampling and surficial mapping, which they will conduct in the Bonaparte Lake region north of Kamloops. The project will take two years to complete.

Geoscience BC, a non-profit organization aimed at encouraging mineral and petroleum exploration investment in B.C., announced a second major mineral and oil exploration project only a few days later. Geoscience BC is also embarking on a large-scale geochemical survey project, this one to the tune of $5 million.

The Quesnellia Exploration Strategy (QUEST) project will include airborne electromagnetic and airborne gravity surveys, as well as geochemical sampling, over an area of 40,000 sq. km from Williams Lake north to Mackenzie. The project also involves collecting over 2,000 lake and stream-sediments samples and re-analyzing over 5,000 existing samples for base and precious metals.

C.D. (Lyn) Anglin, president and CEO of Geoscience BC, is clearly excited about the project and about the potential of the region the project is testing.

“It’s like the clay belt between Timmins, Ontario, and Val d’Or in Quebec — there you have significant mineral deposits at either end, but nothing in the middle because the overlay hides the minerals,” she says.

“In B.C., we’ve got this trend from south of Kamloops up to west of Mackenzie where there’s known mineral occurrences at the north and south ends, but in the middle there’s almost nothing,” Anglin continues. “We’re pretty sure the geology continues; you just can’t see it.”

Anglin pushed her organization, as well as NRC and the mines ministry, to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the massive pine beetle logging effort.

“Given the pine beetle problem and the challenge that it’s going to create for these communities — the time for geoscience is now,” she says. “As well, right now the access is there — if we find anything that warrants underground follow up, the roads are there.”

The funding for the QUEST project is part of a 2005 $25-million provincial grant to the B.C. and Yukon Chamber of Mines, since renamed the Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia (AME BC). To manage the money, the organization established Geoscience BC as a separate entity. In the organization’s first two years, it has already committed $6 million of the money, much of which has gone into research in pine beetle-infested areas. Anglin says this latest project is just the highest profile pine beetle-related program.

The two projects overlap to some extent geographically, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be creating redundant data.

“We designed the projects to be complementary,” Lowe says. “They’re both contributions to a collaborative exploration plan.”

The information from both projects will be publicly available.

“We want it to be available to everyone, from the individual investor to the junior exploration companies right through to the major mining groups,” Anglin says.

These two new projects complement ongoing work by the Ministry of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources, whose geologists are working on geological mapping, mineral deposit studies, and geochemistry sampling throughout the region infested with pine beetles.

Mineral and energy exploration is considered one of the most effective ways to help diversify the resource economies of beetle- infested areas. The return on investment can be significant: exploration spending stimulated by a geoscience project is often two to five times the value of the project.

“We recognized that, for this region, exploration for mineral and energy resources probably offers one of the best opportunities to create new, well-paying jobs,” Lowe says. “We really hope our data will provoke industry to target exploration in B.C.”

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