Australia - A Tier 1 opportunity

Transcription

1 Australia - A Tier 1 opportunity Stephen McIntosh, Group executive Growth & Innovation Diggers & Dealers, Kalgoorlie 2 August 2016 **Check against delivery** Thank you. Let me first of all acknowledge the traditional custodians past and present on whose land we are meeting on today. It is great to be in Kalgoorlie again. It is just a few weeks since some significant changes in Rio Tinto were announced including the creation of a new Growth & Innovation group and my appointment as group executive to lead the new group. In this role I will be leading a team over 1,200 people who will operate along the entire life cycle of our mines and assets. Playing a vital role in contributing to our company s strength and advancing industry leading standards that will continue to set us apart. Together we are accountable for finding, shaping, developing and delivering assets so they re safe and productive cash-generators. But today I am here to focus on the finding part of the equation. I ll share a little of our exploration past and present but I really want to talk of the future. I like nostalgia as much as anyone, but the future really is about leveraging the collective history and talents we have in this room. It s about making use of what we at Rio Tinto have - the big data, laboratories and research alliances, with what many of you have - the acreage and boots on the ground - to target, identify and discover. I suggest to you that Australia is overdue for a Tier 1 discovery. If you agree with me, I invite you to consider bringing your ideas, your concepts, your core, to us and let s investigate the potential for partnerships. We want to find the next and the best Tier 1 discoveries to grow our business and deliver innovations that make our assets even better. To achieve this we recognise partnerships are key. So my message to you today is, I have an exploration cheque book for quality projects and our door is very much open. Our growth and your success ultimately depend on it - so please don t be backward in coming forward. Before I move into some topics more technical in nature, I would just like to take a few moments to talk about safety and our community role because we recognise there are challenges being felt across our industry, and here in Western Australian. Page 1 of 9

2 I d like to talk about safety because we are as keen and focused as you are to reduce hazards and keep our employees safe. In exploration we work in remote locations, involving cars, planes and helicopters. Our safety performance improves each year in terms of lost time injuries and incidents. Safety is priority one for us, and we want to eliminate fatalities. We see our new Critical risk management (CRM) processes and protocols as key to this. We are keen to share and learn. We would the welcome an opportunity to share our CRM experience and find new ways of reinforcing the discipline of identifying and eliminating critical risks. It is interesting to reflect upon the fact that our industry s social licence often begins with our exploration teams interaction with indigenous communities. Earlier this year Rio Tinto published a 200-page book Why Agreements Matter which has a number of case studies on our approach around the world to Indigenous agreements. In Australia we ve worked with Indigenous communities for decades and have 35 agreements covering our exploration and operation activities. We haven t always got things right, but our actions in Australia s remote and regional communities do make a difference, for example since 2011: we ve spent more than A$3 billion directly with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander businesses; we ve contributed more than A$1.1 billion in beneficiary payments; and we remain one of the largest employers of Indigenous Australians. In March we were pleased to launch our second Reconciliation Action Plan, or RAP, and be the first resources company to receive the highest possible RAP phase or rating. We are also proud to lend our voice to the Recognise campaign and formally recognise the first Australian in the Constitution. Our community role can also be seen in other ways. For example last year here in WA, we announced an extension to our partnership with the Royal Flying Doctor Service through to That lifts our commitment to the RFDS in recent years to A$22 million. The RFDS radio network was for many years the bush telegraph providing support to our geos in the field. Which affords me a chance to briefly dip into our Australian exploration history before the era of mobile phones and 24/7 communication. As many of you know, Rio Tinto has a rich heritage of global exploration success. Much of that success is based here in Australia with assets such as Tom Price, Weipa, Argyle and Century, to name just a few. The exploration group I lead follows in the big boots of geos in the field such as Bill Burns and Ian Whitcher in the Pilbara. Page 2 of 9

3 In three weeks time we ll celebrate half a century of shipments from the Pilbara to the steel mills of Japan. A fabulous discovery, built on decades of hard work by thousands of people. A Tier 1 asset and business. A cost and quality benchmark others aspire to emulate. For those who know the Pilbara well, you may like to visit our website called Groundbreakers and view the history of this great endeavour. The great thing about Tier 1 assets is you can invest in them at any point in the cycle and make a great business even better. That is most definitely the case with our bauxite assets of Weipa and Amrun. It s just over six decades ago that Harry Evans, in a dinghy with a dodgy outboard motor, navigated 300 kilometres of rivers and coastline of Cape York. Thanks to his discovery Cape York bauxite is powering on after 53 years of production. Construction work is progressing well on the new US$1.9 billion Amrun project, south of Weipa. Road works are under way and project activities pick up a gear next year with first production planned for The Pilbara and Cape York are two great discoveries and Tier 1 assets. But we are keen for more, so let me share our strategy and approach. I lead the newly named Growth & Innovation function within Rio Tinto, with responsibility for project generation, such as exploration, and project delivery or development execution. The global exploration component of this is divided into three regional groups. Here in Australia we have three key offices - the 3Bs - Brisbane, Bundoora in Melbourne, and Belmont in Perth. Belmont and Brisbane are where most of our exploration geologists plan and deliver project field work. Bundoora is also home to our research and laboratories and some of the best intellectual property in the industry, but more on that later. This slide highlights some of our significant exploration successes of recent years. We explore for multiple commodities but our current focus is skewed towards base metals and in particular copper. Since 2000 our discoveries have been mostly outside the OECD. Over the last decade Tier 1 discoveries were delivered for free to the product groups, when taking into account exploration costs recovered from divestments. Expressed another way, exploration within Rio Tinto has paid its way and we treat it as a business. This disciplined approach and enviable track record underpins our value case for our shareholders. Page 3 of 9

4 Given this is Diggers & Dealers, and the number of lithium presentations this year, let me touch on our own lithium success - Jadar. Jadar is a quality discovery and, in the truest sense of the term, a unique deposit. Rio Tinto first visited Serbia in 1998 looking for borates, which led in 2004 to the discovery of the Jadar lithium deposit. It included the discovery of jadarite the only place in the world where this unique mineral has been found. At the moment we re progressing through the pre-feasibility study. This includes refining our test work and trials at our in-house Californian and Australian research facilities. Subject to approvals and investment decision, it could be in production early next decade. That s Jadar, but let me give you an overview of our current exploration activities. Globally we are exploring for eight different commodities across 17 countries. Our global exploration spend - as distinct from project evaluation and technology programme work - is in the order of US$150 million a year. The exploration portfolio has in recent years become more dominated by projects in the OECD and Peru. We like to describe ourselves as commodity agnostic, but it s fair to say we re keen to find a Tier 1 copper asset. During the last year we have combined our exploration effort with new joint venture partners in projects around the globe. We have now more than 10 projects in partnership with public listed companies in Australia, USA, Chile, Serbia, Zambia and Botswana. In Australia, we have partnerships with public companies such as Antipa here in WA and a few other private partnerships. We are open for business and looking for the next Tier 1 discovery. Our ambition to deliver a Tier 1 copper deposit will not be easy. The analysis we have done shows the challenge. Our experience shows that only one percent of the targets we generate are likely to be a discovery. We need to continue to invest and renew our pipeline to increase our chances of T1 discovery. The good news is globally, greenfield Tier 1 copper discoveries are made, on average, once every four years. The challenge is it takes an average of 25 years from exploration programme inception, through to discovery and then first production. The chances are that any new copper discoveries my team make under my watch are likely to be in production when many of us are in retirement. The trend in recent years is clear. Discoveries occurring in increasingly more challenging jurisdictions, and more challenging to extract given either geological depths or surface infrastructure needs. Along with other supply side challenges such as declining grades we see copper as an attractive commodity sector. Page 4 of 9

5 Regardless of the price cycles, we want to ensure we have a pipeline of high quality options to both sustain and grow our business - and one of best ways to do that is though a fresh discovery. This slide (and the research it is based on by Richard Schodde) on the global exploration spend over the past 30 years would be well known to many of you. It shows the number of discoveries, excluding bulk commodities, made since 1996, along with the estimated worldwide mineral exploration expenditure. What is not shown here is the general decrease in the quality or size of new greenfield discoveries, especially those since the mid-80s. The graph reflects both brownfield and greenfields exploration and shows that in the space of a decade there was a near ninefold increase in exploration spend. Three key points spring to mind. First, despite the higher spend, discovery rates fell. The industry could be accused of busy being busy rather than busy being successful. Second, now that exploration spend levels are falling, every dollar counts. We should look to move from opportunism to opportunity and use partnerships and technology to turbocharge discovery selection and activity to get better bang for our industry buck. The third point I would make is, When was the last Tier 1 discovery in Australia? We might have to go back two decades or more, maybe to Century Zinc or Cadia-Ridgeway. I suggest a Tier 1 discovery in Australia is overdue, and we want to be involved with you in finding the next one. Getting boots on the ground will be key. I m sure we all recognise the industry challenges of achieving timely exploration access. The Productivity Commission s 2013 inquiry provided a sobering assessment of the various state approaches and requirements and the lengthy time taken from the lodgement and granting of an application to getting on the ground. In many cases, the first year can be exhausted by regulatory approvals, truncating the time left for actual exploration activity. I should make it clear this is not about seeking proper consent to enter land nor being held accountable or following environmental, cultural and heritage best practice. The issue does not necessarily lie with legal and/or moral obligations. As an industry we need to work closely with regulators to find better ways to streamline the process. To try to remove some of the inefficiencies in the system. To find ways of better distinguishing between baseline and low-level field reconnaissance work and more intensive activities or ways of have approval steps run in parallel rather than in sequence. Page 5 of 9

6 For many smaller companies the time taken to get on the ground will stretch their financial resources and patience. All the more reason I suggest juniors should look to try and partner through the ups and downs of both the commodity and regulatory cycles. Improving access will mean more time in the field and more time to leverage new technologies. The technologies available in our industry have never been better. What the old timers would have given for a phone that worked, an XRF in the backpack, or a laboratory focused on path-finder element testing. Despite the many new technologies and powerful computing power at our disposal over the past 20 years we ve not seen an observable lift in discovery rates. Maybe it s because we are not collaborating enough. So how can we improve discovery rates? Clearly we can do better in some of the traditional areas of mapping, sampling, drilling and the like. But harnessing new micro-analytical technologies and bringing to life the legacy data we all hold is the new opportunity. Imagine the power of taking decades of field work and reanalysing it for new path finder minerals and chemical signatures. Resistate Indicator Minerals or RIMs technology is one such example. Last year here at Diggers & Dealers my colleague Ian Ledlie talked briefly about RIMs and their application in greenrocks, a copper research initiative. Greenrocks was a collaboration between AMIRA, working with University of Tasmania, and a range of research partners. At its heart the technology determines the age and chemical signatures of path finder elements. What began as kimberlite indicator minerals testing 15 years ago has now been applied to copper. For copper, epidote and chlorite provide the tell-tale clues to the location and fertility of porphyry systems. With a few samples we can potentially detect a copper orebody up to four kilometres away, well outside the visible pyrite halo. In a blind test, we took a small size sample within a wide proximity of Bingham Canyon and we were able to vector in on the main resource areas that exists today. We ve done this for other deposits too. We see this technology as a competitive advantage in two ways. First, whilst all of the research sponsors have access to technology, what sets us apart is our in-house capacity to process samples at low cost. The second point of difference is the proprietary global data we have of copper projects built over many decades. This increases our ability to compare and contrast deposit age styles and types. We are able to sift and prioritize opportunities based on preferred mineralogy and chemical signatures. Page 6 of 9

7 It works in theory, it works in the lab, it works in field trials, and now we want to use it to find a Tier 1 discovery. So if you have a copper concept, my hope is you will come and knock on our door. Let s use the latest available technology, for who knows what we might find - it might increase your odds of success, and ours. Combining the best new analytical technologies with modern data storage approaches and decades of legacy data is yet to be fully realised, but it is within our grasp. Broadly speaking, as an industry, we have been reasonable data-hoarders, poor data managers and very poor translators of data into knowledge. At Rio Tinto we ve invested heavily, very heavily in fact, in digitising our legacy and public data In our Australia we have almost 3 million surface samples from our proprietary databases and 8 million samples from public datasets. We are replicating the approach we ve taken here in Australia in other priority locations and we now have 15 million surface samples from around the world from various public sources. We have also invested heavily in organising our legacy physical samples in Australia, which is now available in our Belmont office. We treat our legacy samples as exploration assets. But it is not just data for data s sake, it s to serve a purpose. It s to improve target selection, so if you want to share an interesting find or concept, we can see if it s distinctive or an outlier and a result worthy of closer inspection. And computing power is beginning to transform mineral exploration much in the same way it has the oil and gas industry with 3D modelling to look deeper with more spatial detail and options. I mentioned a few moments ago how we have combined public and proprietary surface sample data. A similar approach can combine geophysics, gravity, magnetic, metallurgical and chemical data and can also build 3D models. Whilst each of the individual technologies has been around for years, we have the capacity to stitch it all together and to thinly or thickly slice, or peel back, the surface cover. Rio Tinto has been a sponsor for the collaborative Uncover initiative combing such geophysics models. As one example, we can pull together all the decades of data we have in the Pilbara and create a model of combining its shallow lithographic structures and gravity, magnetic and its chemical signatures. And we can make some assumptions and set some criteria - such as low strip and low phosphorous - on where the next near mine or brown-field exploration should take place. But we would like to use such approaches to discover new greenfield Tier 1 opportunities. It s one tool at our disposal, for we all recognise there is no one silver bullet. It requires a smart combination of tools, technologies, partners and pragmatism. Page 7 of 9

8 A pragmatism that says desktop concepts need to be tested with the rotary lie detector through having boots on the ground and rigs in the field. So let me summarise. I believe Australia is overdue for a Tier 1 discovery. In this environment every dollar counts and we can do better at sharing risks and rewards. Let s let the specialists do what they do best. In the case of majors like Rio Tinto that s using our decades of experience, and modern technologies, to sort the novel idea from the Tier 1 opportunity. In the case of junior explorers, that is getting out in the field and testing them. Last year at this conference we indicated we wanted to work and partner with more like minded explorers. We re open for business so come on in and talk with us. Page 8 of 9

9 Contacts on Twitter Media Relations, EMEA/Americas Illtud Harri T M David Outhwaite T M David Luff T M Investor Relations, EMEA/Americas John Smelt T M David Ovington T M Media Relations, Australia/Asia Ben Mitchell T M Bruce Tobin T M Matthew Klar T M Investor Relations, Australia/Asia Natalie Worley T M Rachel Storrs T M Grant Donald T M Rio Tinto plc 6 St James s Square London SW1Y 4AD United Kingdom T Registered in England No Rio Tinto Limited 120 Collins Street Melbourne 3000 Australia T Registered in Australia ABN Page 9 of 9