Agile Geoscience: The Global Mining Innovation Priority for 21st Century Leaders

‍By Flavia Tata Nardini, CEO & Co-Founder, Fleet Space Technologies
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The urgent demand for minerals is growing faster than the global supply chain’s ability to adapt to the realities of changing economic and geopolitical conditions. Refined copper could face a 304,000-tonne shortfall in 2025, with an even wider gap expected in 2026, according to consultancy firm Wood Mackenzie, cited in the Financial Times. 

Meanwhile, as ore grades fall, and costs rise, the International Energy Agency projects that by 2035, production from existing and planned mines will meet only 70% of global demand. Prolonged mineral scarcity is a constraint on the energy transition, technology, and the growth of future industries. 

At a moment when the world needs faster, more efficient discovery than ever before, how the global minerals industry adapts to this challenge will define the course of the 21st century. The reality is that the processes and methods that have underpinned traditional exploration are now the bottlenecks preventing its progress. 

Why Legacy Workflows Are Slowing Us Down

Mining organisations have long been structured around narrow technical disciplines: geophysicists over here, drill engineers over there, geochemists in another silo. Each expert executes tasks aligned to their specialty - but not always aligned to the problem that actually needs solving. In traditional systems, teams optimize tasks, not decisions. And when every discipline works linearly, insight arrives too late to matter.

Weeks or months often pass between data acquisition and decision. By the time data reaches decision-makers, drilling seasons have closed, environmental conditions have shifted, or capital has moved elsewhere. Insights are lost in data-archives, individual brains, or even in hand written notes. Today, the cost of delays are measured in billions, not drill metres. Discovery, as a result, slows.

This problem is compounded by the industry’s dominant investment model. Exploration funding often hinges on the success of one borehole at a time - a structure akin to betting on a single stock rather than managing a portfolio. Incentives to secure the next drilling investment encourages short-termism, high-risk drilling, and fragmented learning.

To break this cycle, we must replace slow, sequential workflows with continuous data acquisition - fueling optimisation at the portfolio level and data-driven resource allocation at the project level, while maximising the value of assets to capitalise on market opportunities.

Agile Geoscience: 21st Century Competitiveness

By combining the lessons learned from the traditional model over centuries with the capabilities of space-age and AI technologies, there is a new model rapidly taking precedence: Agile Geoscience.

Leveraging advances in satellites, real-time geophysical sensing, and AI, resource leaders are adapting to become more agile, data-driven, and integrated to build more secure and resilient mineral supply chains of the future, and Maaden is leading this transition as a pioneering global model the broader industry is following.

In partnership with Fleet Space & Tahreez JV, Maaden is completing the world’s largest 3D multiphysics survey and AI-enabled drill targeting campaign across over 12,000km2 of the Arabian Shield to unlock the Kingdom’s 2.5 trillion in mineral assets in support of Vision 2030. 

Maaden and its ambitious exploration strategy marks a new chapter in the future of mineral leadership in the 21st century - enabling Saudi Arabia’s rise as a foundational pillar  to the global mineral supply chain. 

And with the world’s largest 3D subsurface model of the Arabian Shield, the Kingdom is poised to become the global leader in exploration intelligence - a digital resource that will define mineral discovery in the AI era.

The Future Belongs to First Movers

Now being used in the field around the world to drive faster, smarter, and cleaner exploration outcomes at scales that were previously unimaginable, Agile Geoscience is reducing drill costs up to 60% and improving success rates up to 4X worldwide. With technologies like Fleet Space’s unified exploration platform, ExoSphere, Maaden and other global mining leaders can survey and build integrated 3D subsurface models of opportunity zones and build high-resolution resource estimates in months rather than years. 

Agile Geoscience is a structural shift - one that replaces slow, sequential exploration with fast, adaptive, intelligence-led development. It creates the conditions for new financing models, more sustainable operations, and a step-change in discovery success. Mining leaders, like Maaden, who adopt Agile Geoscience now will define the next century of discovery on Earth and the foundation for what comes next. 

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