News

IGS attended the 3rd UK-Kazakh Inter-Governmental Commission (IGC) held in London on 22nd November and gave a joint presentation at the Mining Subgroup with the Natural History Museum (NHM) on a proposal to develop a Geocluster within Kazakhstan.

Several Memorandum of Understandings (MoUs) were also signed at the IGC, including an MoU between KazGeology, the state-owned National Exploration Company in Kazakhstan, and the Department of International Trade (DIT), which included details of the proposal to KazGeology from IGS, The University of Exeter’s Camborne School of Mines (CSM), and NHM, with whom IGS has been working closely over the past few months.

The IGC was opened by an address from the Rt Hon Greg Hands, Minister of State for International Trade, and was also attended by senior Kazakh Government and industry representatives.

Representatives from KazGeology, the NHM and DIT visited IGS on 23rd November to further discuss these proposals and also have a tour of the National Geoscience Repository at the British Geological Survey.

We thank KazGeology for their time and look forward to continuing our discussions with them over the coming months.

We are pleased to welcome Edd Lewis to IGS as a Senior Mineral Resource Geologist. Edd joins us from his most recent position at Geological Survey Ireland (GSI), but has extensive previous international exploration experience in many countries including Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Greenland, Gabon, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Namibia, Jordan, and Australia.

Edd has a MGeol in Applied and Environmental Geology from the University of Leicester and has previously worked for Rio Tinto and SRK Consulting, most recently in their Brisbane office.

In addition to adding experience to our core business, Edd will also be involved in helping further develop and promote IGS Xplore, our proprietary-developed software service which highlights prospective areas for mineralisation.

On joining IGS, Edd said “I am very much looking forward to working with the team at IGS and applying my experience to assist development of the IGS Xplore Prospectivity Mapping platform”

We also bid a fond farewell to Aoife Brady who takes up a new position, co-incidentally also at GSI. Aoife has been a valued member of IGS who helped to develop and promote Xplore throughout her time here, and we wish her well for the future.

Of these staff changes, Dr Peter Zawada, Managing Director of IGS, said “We welcome Edd to our team and look forward to him to continue to develop and promote Xplore, as well as contributing to the success of our core business. Aoife has been an important and hard-working member of IGS, and whilst we will miss her from the team, we hope that she finds her new position equally as rewarding”.

Antony Benham from IGS recently attended the Mining Show in Dubai, chairing many of the sessions and panel discussions over the two-day event.

The Mining Show, previously known as MENA Mining, is one of the largest mining-related events in the Middle East and brings together Ministers and other senior governmental advisors with key figures from industry to discuss and debate issues in exploration and mining. This year topics ranged from challenges facing the mining industry in the next few years to technological advances in the exploration industry, and even one talk on the potential for mining asteroids.

As well as meeting with geological surveys and advisors, the event was a successful opportunity to publicise IGS to a wider audience, and IGS is grateful to the organisers of the Mining Show, Terrapinn, for the invitation to chair at this event.

We are pleased to welcome Dr Christoph Dobmeier to IGS. Christoph is a highly experienced structural mapping geologist with extensive overseas experience including Papua New Guinea, Afghanistan, Russia, Southern Africa, India and Switzerland. Christoph has a Diplom Geology (equivalent to a MSc) from Freidrich-Alexander University Erlangen in Germany, and a Doctorate from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.

Christoph was involved in creating the first comprehensive 3D structural model of the Mt Fubilan Cu-Au-Ag porphyry deposit at OK Tedi in Papua New Guinea, and more recently has been involved in training and capacity building at the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul.

Dr Peter Zawada, Managing Director of IGS, welcomed Christoph to the team, commenting “Christoph’s considerable mapping experience further adds strength to IGS and we very much welcome him to the team”.

Christoph added “I’m looking forward to working with my new colleagues at IGS and applying my experience to different challenges”.

IGS is pleased to announce the winning of a major new contract in Kenya. This work, titled ‘Provision of Consultancy Services for Development of Specifications, Terms of Reference and Supervision of a Countrywide Integrated Airborne Geophysical Survey for Mineral Resources of the Republic of Kenya’ is funded by the Government of Kenya and led by IGS in partnership with PGW of Canada, with whom IGS have already won several other recent contracts elsewhere.

Dr Peter Zawada, Managing Director of IGS, said “I am very pleased that IGS has won this very important contract which demonstrates our competitiveness and further establishes our reputation in international geoscience consultancy”.

Due to our continued success in attracting new business, a vacancy has arisen for an experienced Senior Geophysicist to join our team at our office in Keyworth, near Nottingham, UK. Further details of this job can be found on Earthworks-jobs.com at the following link: http://www.earthworks-jobs.com/mining/igsint16101.html. The deadline for applications is the 28th October 2016.

IGS is pleased to announce the securing of a new contract in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This project, part of the World Bank-funded PROMINES Project, is to undertake an airborne geophysical survey of six sites in the DRC and to interpret the data derived from this survey. IGS is leading this project and partnering with PGW of Canada and NRG of South Africa.

Dr Peter Zawada, Managing Director of IGS, said “We are pleased to have won this work and to continue to expand our operations in Africa. We are hopeful of securing other work in the DRC in the near future and to further expand our business here and in other parts of Africa”.

IGS has recently released a series of base metal prospectivity maps for parts of Botswana produced by IGS Xplore using free geodata available on the recently launched Botswana Geoscience Portal, hosted by Geosoft.

These maps highlight favourable areas for copper, lead, and zinc mineralisation associated with different mineral deposit styles and can be used to prioritize future exploration or mapping programmes, or to help delineate mining tenement areas.

The IGS Xplore Prospectivity Maps are free to download from the Botswana Geoscience Portal. Each download includes a map in image and shapefile / layer formats and a mineral prospectivity report which provides details of the analyses and the prospectivity results. The Portal can be accessed by following this link.

IGS Ltd is pleased to announce that it has recently completed a significant investment of private capital which will be used to advance the development of IGS Xplore – its proprietary software service that de-risks early stage mineral exploration.

IGS Xplore is an expert system developed by IGS Ltd over the past 2.5 years which was formally commercially launched in early 2016 and which has already received a number of critical endorsements from high profile clients. Xplore is unique in the mineral sector and provides essential prospectivity analysis across a wide range of commodities, covering all the main globally recognised mineralization models, quickly and cost effectively. The market in which Xplore will operate includes the junior, mid-cap and major exploration companies, mining finance/institutional and investment professionals, as well as government departments.

The proceeds of the investment will be used to expand Xplore’s global commercial footprint and to further enhance its functionality. We aim to make Xplore the first ‘port of call’ prospectivity service for early stage explorers.

We are pleased to announce that the latest Annual Review of the ESSP (Extractive Sector Support Programme in Afghanistan has graded the programme as A+. This review, undertaken by DFID, the funders for this work, is the second year in a row that this grade has been achieved, and is a tremendous accomplishment for all involved in this work.

Despite challenges, our projects continue to make good progress at both the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum and the Afghan Geological Survey (AGS). Laboratory equipment for the AGS projects will begin to arrive in August which will be followed by training AGS staff on how to use this equipment, and we are hopeful to refurbish several other pieces of laboratory analytical equipment as well, which should be more cost effective than replacing them with new items.

More details about this work can be seen on the DFID website here.