Back in 1999-2001 I worked on a power project in Vietnam for a couple of years & was fortunate to work & socilaize with a group of Australians who'd been engaged by the power company to 'mentor' the up & coming Vietnamese operators for the power station we were building & commissioning. There were a couple of middle aged enthusiastic charge engineers, but mostly Dad's Army - a group of retired charge engineers whose background was running some of the MegaWatt sized power stations around NSW - the really, really big ones.
One whom I became friends with - he liked to have a punt on the horses (bit hard in Vietnam before the internet made it too easy) & ASX stocks. Back then in 2000, investing was much more akin to researching & backing the stocks you thought long term had potential, less so day trading & the ease which that can be done today (the ASX Casino). The reason I dig as deep as I do into the background of a company might be put down to this time, as he did a lot of study into companies listed on the ASX - he told me about a company working on a tech that used flourescent lighting in supermarkets to send a frequency signal tuned to display tags on shelves that could automatically change the price tag. We also talked a lot about a company who had started to fly planes over unexplored & explored areas of the outback & were able to 'map' what was buried in the ground with a technology they called "Falcon." FALCON PROGRAM - LINK I can't remember the company (20 years ago) but Falcon was born out of BHP Exploration & BHP Research to identify new reconnaisance technologies. I understand this gravity anomaly technology, new back in 2000 is pretty standard in the geo world nowadays.
Back in 2019 I can remember reading an article where scientists seraching for dark matter, designed an instrument which required the darkest possible conditions to operate therefore they drilled a hole & put the instrument deep down the bore, instead of detecting dark matter actually found that the instrument was sensitive to heavy metals located in the earth around it.
Alan Duffy, mentioned in the article above, is working with a spin out from Swinburne to use what sounds like a similar technology, partnered with Oz Minerals, to help mining companies detect weaknesses in dams, Swinburne start-up receives $1.5m investment to help make mining environmentally safer Australian start-up, mDetect, a spin-out company from Swinburne University of Technology, is using particles from space, known as muons, to help mining companies detect weaknesses in dams that secure highly toxic mining waste by-products, making them environmentally safer.
The mDetect team pulls together the deep technical expertise and research of Professor Alan Duffy, Dr Shanti Krishnan and Craig Webster, along with the business acumen and start-up experience of Dr Eryadi Masli and Dr Jerome Donovan.
One of the most interesting characters I've discovered in the past few months is a gentleman called Robert Friedland. The video embedded below is one of the more entertaining presentations with respect to injecting a level of pragmatism into the discussion around decarbonisation & challenges that this is up against. But in line with new technologies which become standard practice over time, Ivanhoe Electric seem to have something quite interesting in terms of how to map an ore body. The technology is called Typhoon & please watch from the 13:09 minute mark until 15:39.
If you have time, I highly recommend watching the full Robert Friedland Keynote - someone who knows all about Vanadium as well. Thinking about the problem differently, in fact as with Alan Duffy's team looking to solve a different problem, can lead to new standards being applied in established industry. Who knows if the SABRE technology with Oz Minerals backing the R&D could in fact lead somewhere else - noting BHP, who were instrumental with the Falcon technology, have launched a bid for Oz Minerals.
(20min delay)