Managing Director of RSC
René Sterk is a geologist and the Managing Director of RSC, a global group helping mining and exploration companies develop their mineral resources responsibly and effectively. For more than 20 years, he’s worked on exploration, resource development, and mining projects across every continent and over a wide range of commodities.
René is also the Founder and Technical Director of Opaxe, a digital platform that makes mining data more accessible, and Founder and Chair of Barkly Rare Earths, a soon-to-be-listed exploration company focused on projects in Australia’s Northern Territories.
With a background in geology, business management, and governance, René is passionate about combining good science, smart data, and strong values to shape the future of the mining industry.
Brett Davis: Firstly, thanks for giving Coring the opportunity to interview you, René. It’s a real pleasure to sit down and chat with you. But, we both know that this is payback, because you interviewed me some time back on your very popular Measured podcast series. Can we start off by having you tell the readers what interested you in a career in geology?
René Sterk: My parents dragged me and my younger brother into the European Alps when we were six and seven years old. We walked from hut to hut, carrying a backpack for days on end, collecting stamps and walking stick badges. Being in the mountains has always been my happy space, and even though I didn’t realize it at the time, the love for rocks was born then and there. We talk about the difficulty of getting kids into geology, but for me, it was all she wrote when someone pointed at the Matterhorn and said, ‘That’s a piece of Africa; cool, eh?’. This then morphed into the usual rock collection and dinosaur fascination in my early teens, but also with a sniff of astronomy and computing. Around 14, I became aware of geology as a discipline, and I never looked back.
Brett Davis: René Sterk is the face of RSC, a globally recognized consultancy with expertise in Exploration, Resources & Reserves, and Geoscience. What does RSC stand for? What made you establish the company? And where do you find most of your work is in terms of service area and global location?
René Sterk: Ha, well, RSC is simply a result of having only had two hours to register a name before buying a plane ticket to Africa for my first job. I figured that everything with ‘geo’ in a company name sounds daft, and to be part of the cool kids, it was clear you needed three letters. I don’t have a middle name, nor did I have any friends, so I just grabbed another letter to add to my initials. Boring, right?
I can come up with some poetic justification and moral validation as to why I established the company, but really, it comes down to the simple fact that I’ve always been an arrogant arsehole and wanted to do my own thing. I like throwing parties, I like working together with the people I choose, I like growing things, creating things, trying things, discussing things, breaking and rebuilding them, changing the mold, doing it differently just to point out that it can be done. I get satisfaction out of that. I love it when someone says, ‘That can’t be done.’ Hold my beer! Money has never been a motivator for me; it really is just about the journey of working together with like-minded people doing what you love.
RSC’s work is all over the place. We’ve worked in the deserts of the Middle East, all over Africa, Asia, above the polar circle in Europe, the Americas, and even on the ocean floor, as we are also deep into the seabed nodule business.
Brett Davis: You are a globally acknowledged expert on resource geology, but your skills extend much further than that, including being an accomplished structural geologist. Do you get much chance to spend time on the rocks and look at drill core or mines?
René Sterk: Your question reminds me of the decisions made along the way, and someone recently asked me if I had any regrets throughout my career. The only thing I ever wanted to do was to map. Be in the field, map rocks, and get paid to do it. That was the dream. Any structural skills I had, I have probably lost, as I don’t do as much of it as I used to. I’ve been gradually attracted by the bigger-picture puzzle of mining: the interaction of geology with engineering, metallurgy, laboratories, drill rigs, data quality, economics, reconciliation, and even psychology (why are we doing things the way we do?).
As many do, I started in the field and worked mostly in exploration. That was a blast. Didn’t have a clue what ‘resource geologists’ do, as I was trained to look at the squiggly lines and drum up a story of where the oil is, being Amsterdam University-educated. I guess I had one course from a dude who talked about coal deposits in Eastern Europe, but it didn’t necessarily grab me. When I moved to New Zealand, I was given a job to go and map something, and a world opened!
I was mostly doing fairly basic exploration work, but it was only when I walked into a little field office in Leigh Creek that I thought: holy shit, someone has been here before me who knows how to do stuff right. It was a watershed moment for me. That person was Iain Groves. There, I rolled from exploration into resource development, and suddenly I was examining sections of an orebody, not just a soil sample grid. Now that was exciting. And it was Michelle Wild who was explaining to me, for the first time, what resource geologists really do.
From that point onward, I drifted increasingly away from exploration and more into estimation. I’ve always liked math and computers, so I liked suddenly being able to do something with that as well.
But to get to your question: I realized soon enough that a good resource model hinges on good geology, and there was something where I really felt comfortable. I understand the math, but I am no Georges Matheron [EN: a French mathematician, civil engineer of mines, and recognized as the founder of geostatistics and the co-founder of mathematical morphology]. I understand structural geology, but I am no Brett Davis. But the interplay between those is where I really felt comfortable making good decisions.
But then you realize that you cannot really be good at resource geology if you don’t also master various other related technical matters. You must understand reporting codes, and a lot of time went into that. You have to understand how a laboratory works, so a lot of time went into that, too. You have to understand the quality of your data, and that has taken me years to dive into. That has meant that I haven’t been able to continue ‘specializing’ in structural geology, nor in resource geology, per se. I have been picking up all these other disciplines and subjects and have tried to get good at those, to be a better-rounded professional. That’s the (very) long answer to an otherwise simple question!
Brett Davis: If not looking at rocks, what occupies most of your time? Is travel a big part of your workflow?
René Sterk: At the moment, I am spending a lot of time working with our technical teams. My technical consulting mostly involves working with the great geologists in our team. But when I do get out and play, I try to pick the really fun things to do, and currently, that is reconciliation at big mine sites. And yes, all of that requires a lot of travel.
By the way, I must also make it clear that I am not an expert in resource geology, and that’s not feigned humility. A little story if you humor me: what the internet has allowed us is to actually ‘see’ what that top of the mountain looks like in almost any discipline. For instance, say you’re good at tennis and you’re pretty chuffed about that. But then you watch people play on TV and you suddenly realize how much space there is between you and them. And then some. I have been playing competitive chess since an early age, and I was a decent player, floating around 1900 Elo. So, you’re in the top 1% of global players. However, you have international masters, grandmasters, and then super grandmasters. And they all broadcast on YouTube about how their mind works, and you are simply so, so far below them. I always imagine it is the same in our industry. There are the true masters who live isolated lives at the top of mountains. What I am good at is being very tenacious and connecting dots. And I try to do my research when I get stuck on a problem. But the title ‘expert’ is not for me.
Brett Davis: You have a team of around 100 RSC employees, who are spread across the world. How much interaction do you have with the teams? How do you keep abreast of what they are doing, and what frustrates you most in terms of management?
René Sterk: I am across most of the technical jobs we have on, so I participate in progress meetings and so on. Our management group has several ops meetings where we cycle through all current jobs, and any that have an orange or red traffic light for whatever reason get some more interaction. So, being in Dunedin in New Zealand, I spend a lot of time on Teams at all hours of the day, as we have staff in Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and New Zealand.
Frustrations? Plenty, but there are those you can control and those you can’t. So, you work through it. I try to see them as challenges you just have to work through.
Brett Davis: Let’s pander to the real geologist here: is there a particular mineral system or commodity type that interests you most?
René Sterk: Well, I’d be lying if I said that structurally complex gold deposits don’t have a special place in my heart. I love the hunt for that little geometric pattern that gets your eye in on the puzzle, a little relationship between two variables that you just feel have a meaningful implication on paragenesis. So, it’s not about the natural beauty of the mineral system itself, I guess, and more about the layered complexity, the four-dimensional puzzle, that grabs me.
Brett Davis: You’ve worked across a lot of exploration projects globally, so what is the most exciting exploration project you’ve worked on historically and why?
René Sterk: Well, I’d have to say WA1’s Luni niobium deposit has been quite special. It’s not every day that you get to work on a discovery of that size and impact. I had nothing to do with the discovery myself, but to be able to interact with that team on that deposit over the years of development was a high point.
Another is Alpha’s Kerkesha license in Eritrea. Not only was that a spectacular place for geology and culture, it involved two separate discoveries where a story needed unpicking, and you’re the first one around to experience it. Really fun and exciting.
And of course, I’d have to say: Barkly Rare Earths, a company that we founded ourselves through RSC in 2020 and where we discovered a high-grade regolith-hosted rare earth deposit in NT, Australia. Drilling the first holes into that and seeing those results come back is one heck of an experience.
Other than being close to these ‘discovery stories’, plenty of other projects with great stories and experience, but perhaps no mine at the end. Driving around North Queensland in a 4WD, looking at rocks, and getting paid for it was just fantastic. Flying across the Northern Mongolian tundra in one of those big Chinook helicopters on the way to the Russian border was cool. Bumping around on snowmobiles above the polar circle in Sweden was fun. And dropping into a desolate creek in Alaska looking for alluvial gold was special, too. The list is long!
Brett Davis: You’ve also worked in a lot of countries and on a lot of continents. Are there any skills or mindsets that have helped you in your roles in these places?
René Sterk: Whenever you go, people are always doing their best under whatever circumstances they are working. My mindset is that people on the ground generally know much more about the geology they’re working with, but perhaps they haven’t joined a few specific pieces of the puzzle. So, I do try to challenge people where I go. I get paid to come up with answers, so part of me is certainly very focused when I am on the ground for a short time, and that makes me sometimes hard to work with. Yet, at the same time, we’re all human beings with our own work and home life stresses, so I try to insert some humor along the way.
Brett Davis: Apart from me, who have been great mentors or made a significant influence on you in your professional career?
René Sterk: Haha! So many people have helped shape my career. First, there are Greg Partington and Michelle Stokes, who saw something in me and gave me my first job in New Zealand 20 years ago. I picked up two key things here: how to write a proper report and how to carry out good exploration, based on sound geology. It’s great to have the bar that high on your first job.
Then I worked with Roger Mustard, again, an excellent geologist, nudging me in the right direction, and always super helpful in guiding me. After that, Nick Corlis really allowed me to reach high, and I learned how to manage projects, budgets, and people. Then Iain Groves showed me a certain tenacity and devotion to the craft that I really took to heart.
Getting into the resource space, and having started RSC, it was Shaun Hackett, Ivor Jones, and Lynn Olssen who were available to answer all my endless questions. Errol Smart was my first client, but he was happy to double as a mentor, teaching me about deal-making, growing a company with assets in a tricky jurisdiction. We ended up working together only a couple of years later.
Afterward, after launching RSC, it has always been a matter of just emailing people for help. Some of these people I don’t even talk to all that often, but their work is what I use constantly, so they’ve been silent mentors without them knowing it! It’s just amazing what people are prepared to do to help. First was Simon Dominy, whom I bombarded with coarse gold questions, and who does such amazing things for the industry with his publications. The same goes for so many others: Marat Abzalov, Jacqui Coombes, and Mark Noppé, to name a few. Geoff Lyman has a special place in my heart. Geoff didn’t take prisoners; a true sampling expert who was able to work with a dumbass like me. I learned so much from him.
In RSC, Chris Baker and Bruce Harvey are my inner circle of business mentors and my fellow directors. I’ve had the pleasure of Chris’s advice for more than 15 years now.
Brett Davis: One topic we commonly talk about, but rarely put into print, is that of the health hazards of working in different countries and environments. Has your health ever been challenged, and, if so, what happened?
René Sterk: Never in a life-threatening way. I do remember getting hundreds of tiny little red dots all over my lower body whilst on a mapping job in South Africa in 2008. I couldn’t figure it out, thought they were bloody bed bugs or fleas, as I couldn’t find evidence of any insects. At one point, I woke up with a gland as large as a tennis ball in my upper leg and intense fevers. Turned out to be the African Tick Bite Fever. Nothing that good old doxy couldn’t kill fast enough, but pretty unpleasant for a few days. No malaria, though! Which, after spending years in most corners of Africa, is lucky, given that I stopped taking prophylactics a long time ago.
Other than that, plenty of bouts of gastro and food poisoning, one of which had me in the hospital for 24 hours. I am sure that, compared to you, it is hardly an impressive list, and I intend to keep it that way!
Brett Davis: Machine Learning, AI, and technology are advancing at a rapid pace. I note that you and RSC have managed to keep up with this. Where do you see the innovations going forward?
René Sterk: I have colleagues who are far better placed than I am to talk about this, so I am not going to crystal-ball gaze based on copying other people’s well-published thoughts on this. The first thing I’d say is that, even though we do employ data scientists, we don’t market ourselves as market leaders in this space. Where we add value is again at the interface of the solution box (the software, the scripts, the algorithms) and the geology. For instance, when preparing mineral prospectivity models, we know that, just the same as with resource models, it’s all about the quality of the data and the geological understanding and maps you are feeding into it. Therefore, we partner up with a specialist group to apply the advanced algorithms, and we prepare and validate data and the output models.
One thing I don’t see a lot of people talking about is the ability to apply the algorithms to clean or curate data. It is bizarre how much crappy data is out there, whether it’s a project with three holes in it or one of the larger mines. I am sure that in another 25 years, we will be looking back and wondering: what were we thinking? Just press this button, and all your data will be flagged for quality and consistency.
Brett Davis: You have a well-established and well-known public profile at the professional level, contributing to conferences, workshops, discussions, etc. One thing that has amazed me is your level of diplomacy when some of the comments and questions are critical or made to invoke uninformed debate. Please tell us the secret to remaining calm under fire!
René Sterk: I read the other day somewhere: ‘Choose your battles wisely, sometimes peace is better than being right.’
I do try to poke, because I like a bit of jousting. And sometimes it’s important to make sure that misinformation does not spread further. Then again, who am I to judge? So, I try to layer any public comments with enough je ne sais pas, and not throw oil on the fire… Call it diplomacy, I guess, but it comes down to arguing the topic and not the person, and too many people out there get so frigging personal with stuff! I also try to stay away from topics or discussions that nothing good can come from. In terms of staying calm, the first thing that comes to mind is a Big Lebowski quote, there’s one for every situation.
I like listening to podcasts, and in particular those by a fellow called Sam Harris. I always like how he deals with opposing thoughts and conflict. I try to take a leaf out of his playbook. Sometimes speaking up is good; other times, I really don’t need to get involved.
Brett Davis: The next few questions are standard ones, as many of us want to defer to experts like you for the answers. As a widely traveled geologist, what part of the world do you think is highly prospective for finding new world-class orebodies?
René Sterk: I am too far out of that game to say something useful about this. With Barkly Rare Earths, we found a great deposit in Australia, and the WA1 Luni project is also on home ground, so I don’t think I would call out some obscure country and rave about its prospectivity just to appear knowledgeable. I worked in Türkiye a fair bit, I’d say plenty of stuff to find there still. I think the next 10 years in Saudi Arabia can be very interesting, let’s see.
Brett Davis: Leading on from the previous question: Everyone has a handful of deposits that have left a mark on them, be it because of the amazing geology, the hideous conditions, the people they worked with, etc. Which deposits do you hold dear, and which ones really were difficult to work on?
René Sterk: I’ve had the luck and privilege to have worked on around 400 projects in the last 20 years, and there are so many that are memorable, some indeed for positives, others for some really terrible things!
The work with Barrick has been special, as you’re working with top-notch people on top-notch assets. Working on Kibali, Carlin, Jabal, Lumwana, Porgera, Reko Diq, Bulyanhulu, has been rewarding in so many ways.
I’ll repeat the Luni deposit in WA with WA1: discovery, geology, and people are all amazing, so that one sits high up there.
The Konongo deposit in Ghana was awesome to work on. It was one of those where an insane amount of value could be added by just being diligent and creative with legacy data, and also resulted in a paper.
Some remote alluvial gold mine in the Yukon was an awesome experience, not because of the geology necessarily, but because I was on a holiday with my wife and firstborn in Europe and was given 24 hours to get there. I think I travelled for 72 hours and was only on the ground for an hour in the end. Crazy.
The Klipwal mine in South Africa was just an insane experience. Not only because it was overrun by AK-47-wielding idiots after five days, shooting a guard and trying to steal gold that wasn’t there. Piecing together a model from whatever was left, going underground and figuring out how a Leica survey station works from Google, hearing the blasting and ripping of pillars each night, man, that was wild!
Spending a night in the PNG jungle after the cheeky Kiwi helicopter pilot told me he couldn’t pick me up because it was too cloudy was another one I’ll never forget. Not the best night I’ve ever had.
Chasing a company in Singapore for a million dollars in outstanding debt is also a memory I’ll not forget anytime soon.
Bobbing on a small boat on the coast of Guinea for a couple of weeks, looking for mineral sands, is up there as an experience as well!
Brett Davis: Is there a particular industry bugbear or fallacy that maddens you and that you see perpetuated, e.g., in ongoing posts on LinkedIn?
René Sterk: The one that I will always react to is idiots who blame the regulatory chaos (read JORC, etc.) on consultants. Some are quite keen to point out that this is all about consultants trying to create work for themselves. I’m so tired of that argument.
Brett Davis: Recently, there has been a fair bit of debate on public platforms about the origins of mineral deposits, particularly a rekindling of the debate of syngenetic vs epigenetic formation. Do you note any fundamental changes in how people interpret mineral deposits, such as using sophisticated 3D models or AI, that have upended long-standing beliefs and transferred the deposits from one mode of formation to another? One mineral deposit model that comes to mind and that is under fire now is the VMS model.
René Sterk: That’s an interesting question. I wouldn’t say that there are any ‘fundamental’ changes; people are always debating things. This is one of the things that I talk about during my technical courses, and is also something that I find interesting when, for instance, organizing MREC25: you bring together all these experts, put them on stage, and there is more stuff they don’t agree on than what they do agree on!
The tools (3D modeling or otherwise) do allow us to better understand and poke these things, but to be honest, it’s the people who do the driving here. I discussed this on one of my recent podcasts (the one with Tim Craske): you need Pythagoras and Aristotle to stand up and say: ‘Hey guys and gals, I think this thing is not a pancake after all.’
I understand that the people challenging that VMS model are getting a lot of crap for it, but I’d argue that without these very people challenging conventional wisdom, we’re not moving forward. Having said that, I also understand the counterargument: people sowing confusion around well-established truths to satisfy their own agenda (pick your favorite topic: religion, COVID, or climate change). In this case, I don’t think that is happening.
Again, I am not getting in the middle of that debate, as it is the space for experts.
Brett Davis: RSC emphasizes the importance of integrated earth science approaches. I commonly find that my visits to sites are one in a sequence of several visits by consultants with different skills but at different times. Do you think exploration and mining companies make enough use of the integration of skill sets from the various disciplines? Is there merit in having several consultants on-site at the same time to combine findings?
René Sterk: What a great question. I have some thoughts on how to work with consultants, and how not to. Having worked for a range of clients, I find it interesting to see how different people expect different things out of their consultants. There’s also many ways in which people interact with consultants. Some like to micromanage; others give complete free rein. Some know how to get value out of them, others don’t have a clue, etc.
So, to answer your question: to integrate consultants’ skill sets, first, they need to know their own gaps. Often it is a matter of: ‘We don’t have the time, just get someone in to do this or that.’ Or they don’t have in-house skills, and they just want to outsource a specific job. Fair enough. But perhaps what you’re hinting at is the ability of consultants to also challenge how their teams work, or how they’re approaching the project. That’s something that I am personally far more interested in and is a relationship I’ve been able to develop with key clients. And then, yes, to work together with other consultants really brings out some amazing results.
For instance, I was lucky enough to be with a client in a gold plant when they just happened to have the consultants who service and audit the automatic samplers on-site. That certainly generated a couple of interesting value-adds that would not have happened otherwise.
Or another one where I happened to be on-site with another consultant, a carbonatite specialist. Because you’re both coming from it from a different perspective, a really nice chemical reaction happens, and value gets created.
So, yes, I really do think there’s value in doing exactly that.
Brett Davis: Many of us have interfaced with less-than-savory individuals or experienced toxic workplaces. Has there been any incident, or have there been any incidents that really disappointed you?
René Sterk: Plenty. At the start of trying to build a business, you can’t easily say no to a lot of people, especially during the downturn years. So, we’ve run into some real pricks. Some don’t pay, some who bully or treat your staff badly, and then there are the narcissists who made it to wherever they are. Not worth dwelling on!
Brett Davis: What does René Sterk do in his downtime?
René Sterk: I like playing games with the kids: Magic: The Gathering, Civilization VI, Age of Empires, or some basketball. I love listening to and playing music. So, I crawl behind the drum kit (just out of view of the camera in my office) or grab the guitar. I love board games, with friends, family, or otherwise. When in Perth, I always look up friends to play some Settlers of Catan deep into the night. I just got back from a ten-day trip walking the Arctic Circle Trail in Greenland, so hiking is another passion; it’s one of the reasons I wanted to live in New Zealand.
Brett Davis: If you had abundant financial funding, is there a fundamentally annoying geology question you’d like to solve or a topic you’d like to work on?
René Sterk: Nothing geologically that I am working on or would be working on. My investment would be in better collaborative and information-sharing tools. This was also the idea about opaxe.com, which we started 10 years ago. We are doing ourselves a disservice in how we deal with data and information. To me, that is a breakthrough area; we keep having to reinvent wheels, and it is all to do with poor data practice, lack of sharing of information, and access to it.
Brett Davis: Any concluding comments or words of wisdom from someone who is fast becoming an industry veteran?
René Sterk: Nothing other than thanking you for the opportunity. One of the added benefits of consulting is the great number of cool people you meet, and it is so inspiring to look around you and see all those people doing amazing things, each adding their brick to the wall. I’d love to have the opportunity to hang out with you in the field sometime. I am sure that would be a blast!
For more information: Get in touch with René on LinkedIn
