Professor Jim Mungall wants to do right by the people who depend on him, discover new things and tell people about them.

“I want to achieve some kind of material success to show the world that I am capable of it,” he says. “I also want to give something back to the world after I have done so.”

He’s the President and Chief Executive Officer of Bronzite Exploration Corp, an early-stage exploration company that’s looking for copper deposits. While the company is based in Ottawa and Toronto, exploration activities are focused on a group of claims in the Canadian arctic.

Bronzite's short-term goal is to bring the Crowberry Project – an almost entirely untested target in a previously unrecognized tectonic belt – to an investment-ready state by the end of 2023.

By the end of the Xplor program, they want to have begun extensive consultation with local governments and other stakeholders in Nunavut, established an exploration strategy, contracted or planned with service providers, and acquired remote-sensed datasets to aid in target selection, in what will necessarily be a short and tightly focused field season.

As a young company with big ambitions, Bronzite will be positioned well by the Xplor program to take significant steps towards realising their goals of identifying and adding value to grassroots exploration targets in North America.

That means pushing them to learn and seek out new experiences.

“The experiences we hope to gain from Xplor will help us establish constructive long-term relationships with local stakeholders and make optimal choices of service providers in the face of project-specific logistical challenges,” says Professor Mungall. “We’ll also learn how to establish best practice in health and safety for operations in extremely remote regions and build strategies for a timely and well-focused collection of information and samples in the field, using current mineral systems approaches as a foundation.”

Long term, the company is looking to acquire and add value to grassroots exploration targets in North America, with a focus on base metals and platinum-group elements.

Discover more about BHP’s 2023 Xplor cohort.