Olympus’ Todd Houlahan, Director, International Mining, gave a presentation at Minex Europe in Sofia, Bulgaria in June 2019. This year’s conference topic was the future of sustainable mining in the Balkans and beyond.

The conference hosted over 190 delegates from 130 companies and 26 countries. The event featured keynote and technical sessions where attendees reviewed global mining progress and the development of sustainable, efficient, and responsible mining in Europe.

A popular topic at Minex Europe was the increasing demand from a variety of industries focused on extracting lithium, nickel, copper, and rare earth elements (REEs) and how this demand will influence the energy and automotive sectors. The role of the European Union for mineral imports and infrastructure for processing materials was also discussed.

Other hot topics for event attendees included:

• Emerging exploration technologies
• Challenges of new exploration companies
• Mineral resource and grade control information

While at the conference, Todd presented case studies demonstrating the innovative use of pXRF in Southern and Eastern Europe. Case studies presented from customers in Serbia, Greece, Bosnia, and Turkey demonstrated:

• In Serbia, XRF as a cost-effective analytical tool for early stage exploration through:
  • Identification of soil anomalies
  • pXRF results supplied to directors in daily drill reports to allow for immediate prioritization of subsequent drillholes without waiting for lab assays
  • Assisting geologists with logging and discrimination of lithologies
• In Greece, use of XRF to extract multielement data from historic samples previously assayed only for copper (Cu) and gold (Au)
• In Bosnia, use of XRF in processing operations and metallurgical accounting during plant commissioning
• In Turkey, use of pXRF for pathfinder geochemistry, lithogeochemistry, and understanding different textures within drillcore, which led to greater understanding in a mineralization event environment