Dr Mike Jones loves the intellectual challenge of discovering the hidden secrets of Mother Earth.

“It’s like solving a murder mystery,” he says, “except they’re clues to finding a world-class deposit.”

That’s the spirit that’s seen Dr Jones and the company he helped found in 2006, Impact Minerals, join the first cohort for BHP’s world-class accelerator program, Xplor. With Senior Geologist Martin Neumann, Dr Jones and his Impact Minerals team are seeking to discover world-class mineral deposits across Australia in a range of precious, battery and strategic metals.

As a junior explorer listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), Impact Minerals is dedicated to the discovery of world-class mineral deposits. The company manages a diverse portfolio of nearly 60 tenements, covering more than 4,000 km2 across mineral-rich regions of Australia, including south-western Western Australia, the Broken Hill region and the Lachlan copper-gold province in New South Wales.

They bring a systematic approach to exploration, built around a philosophy of ‘doing proper work, properly’.  Their innovative thinking and exploration skills have helped them assemble large, strategic ground-holdings in well-mineralised terranes across Australia.

For Xplor, they’ll be developing a concept for copper in Broken Hill, Australia, that’s been 10 years in the making. It’s a significant location for BHP, which was founded in Broken Hill around 140 years ago.

Dr Jones says it represents a ‘copper-plated golden opportunity’ to finally implement some of their ideas and concepts. “With time, money and support, we’re hoping that by the end of the program, we will have achieved breakthroughs in defining new search spaces for copper.”

As a member of the Xplor cohort, the Impact Minerals team will benefit from unique professional development opportunities, including tailored learning across technical, business and operational readiness.

“It will be good to see how technology, in particular, is changing how BHP operates and how that will apply to junior exploration companies,” he says.

Read more on Impact Minerals.

Discover more about BHP’s 2023 Xplor cohort.