Nicole Galloway Warland

Chair – SAEMC Organising Committee, Australian Institute of Geoscientists

Welcome

Nicole is a geologist with over 30 years’ experience in the mining and exploration industry in Australia, Eastern Europe and the America’s. Her experience spans from exploration through project evaluation to open cut and underground mining; with a commodity focus in gold, copper-gold, base metals and uranium.

Nicole is also a Councillor of the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies (AMEC).

Cliffy Wilson

Kuma Kaaru

Welcome to Country

Mike Barlow

Exploration Manger – Alligator Energy

Session 1: Big Lake Uranium – A potential new frontier for sedimentary-hosted uranium mineralisation, Lake Eyre Basin, Northern South Australia

After graduating from University of Sydney with an Honors degree in Geophysics, Mike Barlow started his career in oil and gas exploration with Comalco, working on grass-roots energy exploration throughout the Gulf of Carpentaria. He then moved to mineral exploration where his work with both Rio Tinto (formerly CRA) and BHP has covered greenfields and brownfields base metals, diamond and nickel projects across Australia, Brazil, North America, and Peru. Prior to moving to Alligator in 2023, he was Director for national airborne geophysical programs at Geoscience Australia. He has a master’s degree in engineering from RMIT and is a member of both ASEG and AusIMM.

Anna Mayo

Exploration Manager – Sinosteel SA

Session 1: Modern Exploration for Copper Cobalt in the Historic Dome Rock Mine Area, Olary Province, South Australia 

Anna is currently leading Sinosteel’s South Australian exploration team in their efforts to generate new exploration targets and locate major orebodies within the company’s five tenements in the under-explored Curnamona region of South Australia. In the last 4 years the team has increased the list of potential commodities from magnetite iron ore and uranium to also include copper, cobalt, gold, base metals, REEs, PGEs, and molybdenum.

In 2021 Sinosteel was granted funding for Anna’s ADI project design to apply innovative biogeochemistry techniques across three prospects including land within a conservation park and private reserve. The project investigated the effectiveness of the geochemistry technique to lower impact, increase efficiency, and decrease costs of exploration in arid lands. Results of the study, combined with recently trialled electromagnetic geophysical techniques led to precise target generation and successful diamond drill targeting in 2023 and 2024.

Peter Reid

CEO – Petratherm

Session 1: The Muckanippie Suite – unravelling its enormous Titanium-Vanadium Potential

Peter Reid is the founder and CEO of Petratherm Limited which was spun out from Minotaur Resources in 2004. With over 30 years experience in mineral and geothermal exploration he was part of the Prominent Hill discovery team. 

Rupert Verco

CEO, Cobra Resources

Session 2: Developing the economic basis for Insitu Recovery of Ionic Rare Earths

Rupert is a mining specialist with over 17 years’ experience in Australia and internationally. His key areas of focus include resource definition, reserve optimisation, mine planning, and mine operations. He has managed operations through all phases of the mining cycle on projects that cover a range of commodities including gold, copper, uranium, tin, and iron ore. Rupert is a fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy and holds a First Class Honours in Geology.

Robert Blythman

Exploration Manager, Hamlin Gully

Session 2: A scalable Zambian Style sediment hosted Copper discovery south of the Pernatty Ridge

Robert has over 16 years’ experience as an exploration geologist, focused on South Australia, Victoria and the Northern Territory. He has both mining and exploration experience in orogenic style gold projects and his experience covers a range of commodities including gold, copper, uranium and rare earths.

Anthony Reid

Head of Geology, Fleet Space Technologies

Session 2: A geologist’s guide to subsurface imaging with ambient noise tomography

Anthony is a geoscientist with over 20 years experience across a range of geological methods, including structural geology, geochronology, geochemistry and geophysics applied to regional geology and mineral exploration.

Michael Schwarz

Managing Director, iTech Minerals Ltd

Session 2: iTech’s Eyre Peninsula Graphite Project: The importance of good geology and metallurgy in producing battery anode material

iTech acquired the graphite assets of Archer Materials in 2021 and listed on the ASX later that year. While Archer had done an excellent job of developing high quality graphite assets there were still a few hurdles to producing a product suitable for the battery anode material markets. A basic graphite  concentrate had been achieved but a highly purified spherical graphite (PSG) had not yet been developed from the current resources. iTech set about proving up the metallurgical processes to produce high quality PSG and add additional graphite resources with excellent geological and metallurgical properties to the project.

James Taylor

Structural Geologist, BHP

Session 3: The Oak Dam IOCG Deposit, Olympic Province, South Australia: Unravelling the structural evolution of the Oak Dam Deposit through integration of local and district-scale interpretations

James currently leads the structural geology program at BHPs Oak Dam exploration project. He has delivered significant progress in the understanding of primary structural controls on mineralisation as well as the post-mineral dismemberment of the Oak Dam orebody, culminating in the delivery of the first multi-scale comprehensive 3D-structural model of Oak Dam.

Prior to this he supported BHP’s Olympic Dam operation in mine and resource geology and a variety of roles across multiple BHP West Australian Iron Ore assets, specialising in fully-integrated geological modelling. He is passionate about converting high-quality geological observations, geochemistry and geophysics into accurate and useful 3D-models to support brownfields exploration and resource extraction.

Jonathan Trewartha

CEO, Lincoln Minerals

Session 3: Aiming to be the first new graphite mine in Australia

Jonathon is a mining engineer and developer with experience in exploration, operations, technical, and regulatory approvals, study and project management and corporate via senior positions in Australia and overseas. He holds a WA First Class Mine Manager’s Certificate of Competency.

Caitlin Rowett

Technical Services Manager, Hillgrove Resources

Session 4: Kanmantoo: A Productive Year

Caitlin is the Technical Services Manager and Chief Geologist at Hillgrove Resources, where she has worked for the last 5 years on the development and now the operation of the Kanmantoo Underground Mine. Caitlin has worked around South Australia in both Copper and Gold structurally controlled deposits. 

Larissa Statsenko

Project Management Programs |Sustainable Infrastructure and Resources Management, UniSA STEM

Dr Pavel Spiridonov

Industry Partner / Research Fellow AISRF Stream 3 Lead, UniSA

Session 4: ‘Transforming Australian Regions for Sustainable development: a novel approach to cleaning contaminated sites

Larissa Statsenko is Associate Professor at UniSA STEM researching in Sustainable Infrastructure and Resources Management. She leads and consults for projects and programs of various scales and complexity funded by industry and government. Her applied research portfolio includes mining value chain and mining process optimisation, supply chain resilience, and regional capability ecosystems development in Mining and Defence. 

Pavel has over 30 years of experience working in the government organisations and private companies and has been involved in various aspects of research, development, commercialisation and implementation of innovative technologies and cutting edge materials. Currently Pavel is a leading specialist in the development of the resin in moist mix (RIMM) technology for metal recovery from fine minerals and wastes. He is a Technical Lead in several large collaborative projects including the Australia Economic Accelerator Seed project and the Australia India Strategic Research Fund project.

Kathy Ehrig

Principal Geometallurgist, BHP

Session 4: Olympic Dam Geology – new thoughts about the deposit

Dr Kathy Ehrig is recognised internationally as a leader in geometallurgy, establishing Olympic Dam’s geometallurgy program 2006. She completed her Bachelor of Science in geology at California State University, Fresno in 1984 and earned a PhD in geology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991.