Nicholas (Nick) Oliver (BSc Hons UQ, PhD Monash) is a lead consultant and director within the Australian consortium HCOV Global, Adjunct Professor at James Cook University (JCU), and Honorary Professor at the Sustainable Minerals Institute at the University of Queensland. After positions with CSIRO, Carnegie Institute Geophysical Laboratory (Washington, DC), Monash and Curtin universities, he was Professor of Economic Geology at JCU from 1997 to 2010, and Director of the Economic Geology Research Unit (EGRU). For the last 14 years, he has been a full-time consultant to the minerals sector, focused on the fusion of structural, geochemical and geophysical data, and training. He has broad commodity experience from Au, Pb-Zn-Cu, REE, Fe and U in Precambrian poly-deformed metamorphic belts (Australia, Fennoscandia, Brazil, Guyana shield, West Africa and Canada) to porphyry, epithermal, skarn and other Phanerozoic systems in the Tethys, Middle East, Mongolia, SE Asia and the South American Cordillera.
Brett Davis: Firstly, thanks for giving Coring the opportunity to interview you, Nick. I was really keen to pin you down for an interview, given your impressive international reputation in the mining and exploration industry. In combination with your research and teaching profile, it’s a pretty impressive resumé! I’ll start with my standard lead-in question – what got you interested in a career in geology?
Nick Oliver: Thanks for the invite Brett, it’s an honor. My parents were often taking our family outdoors, driving, hiking and camping around my hometown of Brisbane, Australia. Then, I was lucky enough to take geology in Year 9 Science at high school, and then as a full course in the last two years. Since I was 15, I was fixated on geology. All it took (really) was a good teacher at school – Barry Whelan. Together with my childhood friends Charles (still a friend!) and Mel Wilkinson (both still active geologists), who took the same subjects at school, we wandered around northeastern NSW and southeastern QLD looking for gems, thunder-eggs, fossils, etc. It was quickly cemented by the very easy decision to do a geology major at University of Queensland, and realization of how much fun fieldwork was, and then the surprise of being fascinated by the petrographic microscope.
BD: What projects are you working on at the moment? And what is your level of involvement?
NO: In-house training courses in preparation for FMG (Mount Isa) and B2Gold (online), and a public field structural geology training course in Finland. Several consultancies for repeat clients (juniors) in Chile. For one of these (Tesoro Gold El Zorro project) I’ve been involved right from the start, which has been pretty exciting as it looks like it will get into production in the years to come. I’m the external supervisor to a PhD student on that project too. There are a couple of jobs for new clients in Mongolia (online so far), Australia (greenfields), and an operating mine and related exploration in Finland. Probably, I will be back to the Middle East at the end of the year for in-house training and greenfields work. So yeah, semi-random global exploration and training with repeat and new clients.
BD: Coring started as a drilling magazine, and we like to keep to our roots. So, I’ll ask you a multi-faceted drilling-related question – do you do much work with oriented core? And do you work with other structure orientation methods pertaining to drilling?
NO: Yes, quite a lot, though probably not as much as you. You’ve seen a few posts of mine on LinkedIn that have mirrored yours regarding core orientation. It is alarming to see the broad range of behaviors with respect to core orientation techniques and structural measurements from core, from completely ridiculous to absolutely perfect – even within one company!
The horror stories relate in part to my expectation that a big, high-flying company is likely to send me good structural data for desktop review, then finding I’ve wasted a few days playing with bad data (that I can’t charge for), followed by having to review the whole database, trying to fix it up as best I can, and then seeing what the problem was, or is, when examining the drill core. This was hypercharged by Covid when companies were asking me to do desktop reviews, before, or without visiting the site. There are two main issues: firstly technical, it seems there is a misuse of any device put in front of geologists, even your favorite and trusty rocket launcher in the cases where the ori line is incorrect, e.g. wrong side of the core or off by 20+ degrees, etc., etc.
My favorite tool is IMDEX’s IQLogger, and I thought it was foolproof. You have to work really hard to stuff this one up. But one company at least has found a way. First of all (add sarcastic tone), use the IMDEX Hub (that provides all the collar/survey data in the cloud) but do it so that people will think that everything is going to be OK (false sense of security). Secondly, instead of recording dip/direction directly, only use the calculated alpha/beta, so that it matches your old database. That way, you can send it to your clunky old corporate spreadsheet that calculates dip/direction and allows someone in the company to pretend that they are in charge of all company-wide structural data. This person might provide you with the ‘answers’ a few months later, by which time the core has been well and truly packed away never to be seen again. Oh – and you should make sure that you don’t check the software for whether it is recording the ori line on the bottom or top of the core. So, this process meant that about two years’ worth of structural measurements was entered into the database incorrectly, so, therefore, no one would ever trust that structural data again. Have they changed their procedure? Probably not. I could name and shame this company but they probably wouldn’t care.
And another very major company had done similar at one of its operations and yet were producing perfect structural data at another. An easy solution to the uncertainty associated with whether the method is working is to hold up the drill core in the orientation it should have been in the ground (using whatever imaginary ‘north’ you like), and check to see if the orientation of the structure of interest ‘makes sense’. You could even record these guessed dip/direction data in a datasheet, to see if any subsequent verification matches approximately. If you are using a rocket launcher then this happens by default, but if you are not, it is a crucial check – which should be repeated as often as possible.
The other issue of course is education. People don’t know what to do, what to measure, or why. This is the responsibility of the geologist in charge but often gets left to hapless consultants like you or me. This goes back to the root cause which is increasingly poorer geology training at university but also the perception that senior and chief geologists must immerse themselves in administration and schedules and assume that the less experienced geologists are well-enough trained that they can sort it out themselves. Or else the seniors are afraid because they don’t want to admit they don’t know how to do it (which a 10-second internet search would solve – so it’s just laziness). The tendency is to measure and record everything without adequate structural classification, particularly intensity and thickness of the structure of interest. Minor structures are often assigned the same weight as major ones, so the result is cluttering on drill string displays and in 3D, so the data is then regarded as ‘useless’.
The bottom line to all of this is education; there are too many examples now of poor (actually wrong) datasets and ultimately it leads to poor decisions on drill targets, etc. I’ve seen one small company go belly up, partly as a consequence of generating a structural model for their system that couldn’t be verified by drilling because the model was built from incorrectly recorded structural data in the first place.
BD: Your geology-related career has spanned academia and consultancy. Very few people can boast the impressive research profile you have, especially the number of individually authored or collaborative peer-reviewed papers in international journals. And you’re still publishing! What is the secret behind your drive and publishing success?
NO: Well, the drive now is just a residual habit, and I’m nowhere near as productive now as when I was an academic. As an academic, it was core business as well as the main outcome of the whole scientific endeavor, so there seemed to be a natural driver in the system – the old ‘publish or perish’ syndrome. I consider myself lucky to have been in a golden age of university-based R&D in Australia (1980-90s in particular), which helped and also surrounded by teams of equally enthusiastic mentors, peers and students who could make these publications flow. With a few co-authors, it was simply great fun to work with them (notably Rick Valenta, Paul Bons and June Hill), and the topics were ‘hot’, so it was pretty easy to bolt together the papers. Sometimes, even with great coauthors, the topic was so hard that it took a lot of effort (e.g. some big papers with Bruce Hobbs and Alison Ord). Sometimes the geology itself would drive the demand for the paper to be written, notably much of my early work on the role of structural heterogeneities controlling fluid flow and consequent isotopic and geochemical patterns.
BD: Many people have careers that start off in academia and then transition to industry-related roles. A lot of people I see in the industry positions are doing this toward the end of their careers. What sponsored you to move into the industry arena, well before (I hope) the end of a successful research life?
NO: I thought I was a born academic. I enjoyed teaching and research, had success at grant writing, great mentors and colleagues, etc. My main regret now – not that it’s strong, is that I didn’t leave the university sector about 5 years earlier. I was 50 when I quit. Our earth sciences department had been decimated by a merger in 2005-6 with a large and fairly ineffectual geography school. JCU had always been one of the high performers in the Australian geology scene – particularly in the 1980–2000 period when you and I overlapped there for a while.
In 2002 alone, we produced more papers, graduates, grant money and industry links than any other group in Australia including Monash, UTas CODES and UWA CET. So this was a brutal merger, we went from 13 fully centrally funded academics, eighth or ten postdocs, 60 PhD students and a strong cohort of technical and administrative staff, to three staff, one postdoc, almost no technicians and a half-dozen PhD students, in the space of around five years. Almost 100% academic staff turnover in eighth years. I was the second last rat to leave the sinking ship – Tom Blenkinsop lasted another three years. And this ongoing trend of poor university governance and lack of care by (both sides of) government concerning the relationship between Australia’s wealth and what drives it, has led to the dramatic decrease in functional geology groups around the country. This is at a time when Australia is the 3rd richest country per adult in the world, largely as a consequence of mineral commodity exports. We are all aware of this problem, and personally I’m part of that problem – academics leaving the sector when the sector is in poor shape. OK, that’s the negative stuff. What I didn’t expect when I moved fully into industry is a) how much fun I would have and how many great new friends I would make, b) how much I would learn – as much as in the best days of my doctoral study, and c) how much the difficulty and challenge to produce rapid results via short consultancies would suit me so well, relative to the typical, academic research program of one to seven years duration. It’s been a blast, and I’ve used my previous academic career to full benefit, including being employed by many previous students!
BD: Apart from me, who have been some of the positive influences in your career?
NO: Ha-ha, well, we didn’t overlap for long at JCU, Brett, but your smile was always a positive influence.
It’s a long list, starting with my parents and family – a good school, a great learning environment, and endless encouragement. And I won’t list below all of the graduate students I’ve had – they all had an influence (and they would know how).
Directly regarding my career, first and foremost my longest-term mentor was Rod Holcombe, winner of the Hobbs medal for structural geology about 7 years ago. I’ve known Rod since I was 18 and he was 33 – at this time he showed me a refolded fold in gneisses around Einasleigh in north Queensland on an informal geology trip. I couldn’t believe such folds could exist. By 2nd year he had our entire class doing hand-drawn but geometrically constrained 3D projections of refolded folds from data and field observations we had to process ourselves. And now I guess I’m one of a dying breed of geologists who can see, interpret, and enjoy refolded fold patterns. It used to be such a thing back then! And I love stereographic projections. Rod was also the main stepping stone to my industry career, as he had done the same thing, jumping from academia, about 5 years beforehand. And he was kind enough to get me involved with his consultancy consortium, which I’m now more-or-less in charge of (HCOV Global). Brilliant structural geology teacher, an understated world ‘great’, and a very good friend.
The late and great Vic Wall, my main PhD advisor, taught me everything about the toughest parts of petrology and hydrothermal geochemistry. He was a real taskmaster, very critical, and I responded well to this (unlike some of his other students…). I ended up with his job at Monash when he also jumped to industry, and it was a great pleasure to work with him again as a consultant on a major project in Colombia.
Gordon Lister (Monash, ANU) and Tim Bell (JCU) gave me great jobs at the right time! Bruce Hobbs and Alison Ord (CSIRO, UWA) introduced me to the world of geomechanical modelling and numerical geoscience, but I’ve never really been able to keep up with them as my maths is weak, but it’s always been a real eye-opener. John McLellan (JCU, GMEX) was one of the beneficiaries of this geomechanical legacy and we’ve worked on many R&D and consultancy projects together over the years, with John using the modelling software as his main commercial consulting tool. Doug Rumble of the Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, DC greatly improved my understanding of stable isotopes during my late-80s postdoc (and how much I didn’t want to work in an analytical lab). Several colleagues from Monash (1984-1993) I’ve kept in touch with or worked with for many years, and are very much part of who/what I am as a geologist – most notably Rick Valenta, Andy Wilde, Paul Bons, Dave Cooke, June Hill. Greg Dipple was my first postdoc and he taught me more than I taught him (I’m pretty sure) as he was a whizz with reactive transfer, which has really helped with my understanding of mineral systems. We’ve remained lifelong friends. My partner of 18 years, Haidi has put up with my gallivanting lifestyle (certainly better than former partners, eh-hem), and we plan to continue traveling globally while we can, especially now we’ve found a good dog+cat+house minder. Dogs have certainly been a positive influence on my career too, for all the obvious reasons any dog (and cat!) lover would know. Some of the readers will remember Otto the wonder-dog, who found his way into many hearts over his years as field camp morale-booster and geo-travel companion in the 1990s.
BD: Given the current multi-commodity mineral boom, are you doing a lot of work outside of the commodities and deposit styles you have traditionally worked on?
NO: Yeah, I had a very distinct and quite strong shift from mostly Precambrian R&D metamorphic-structural-economic work as an academic (Fe, IOCG, orogenic Au, some U), into the wonderful world of Mesozoic to recent porphyry-epithermal systems since then, while keeping up a portfolio of global Precambrian work. This has been an amazing learning experience for me, a highlight being standing at a height 5100 m (16 732 ft) near the border of Chile and Argentina during a month-long high-altitude stint for GoldCorp in the Maricunga porphyry belt (thanks Pablo Morelli!). I’ve also had a long-term project looking at hydrothermal REEs in NW Australia (thanks Robin Wilson and Kurt Warburton). All in all, this has sent me to quite a few parts of the world…
BD: I have to ask – political instability/insecurity aside, what part of the world do you think is highly prospective for finding new world-class orebodies?
NO: Saudi Arabia is an obvious one seeing they’ve only been open for new minerals business for a relatively short time. Tim Coughlin (Royal Road Minerals) sent me there recently. Other than that, it seems likely there are probably giant gold deposits still lurking in the Guyana shield, and it’s also not clear that exploration under till in northern Fennoscandia and Arctic Canada (and Russia) has finished providing decent gold discoveries.
BD: Is there a particular mineralization style or deposit type that interests you, and why?
NO: I greatly enjoy the diversity of deposits I work on. It gives insights into all the others. I love really messed up ones, irrespective of commodity. And anything where mineralization is hosted in breccias. Well, also veins, which cover a lot! I love ones where there is widespread disagreement about ore genesis. And ones that are sitting in the middle of rocky deserts. Or thick jungle.
BD: 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?
NO: Obuasi (Ghana) is the biggest deposit I’ve worked on (72 Moz Au+) and probably the most difficult. Sunrise Dam (Western Australia) I have a very soft spot for, because my work there with Mike Nugus, June Hill and James Cleverley straddled my transition from academia to industry, and we were really able to get our teeth stuck into it. Cerro Casale in the Maricunga of Chile was great because of the people and the scenery; that was an amazing crowd, sad to see the deposit ‘on-hold’ at present. The Wolverine REE deposit in NW Australia for similar reasons, great people, great country, and particularly odd geology. I worked on the discovery holes from Ernest Henry IOCG deposit (Queensland) and still haven’t fully worked it out, it remains a lifelong obsession. This is a great deposit, and its genesis has taunted me for 30+ years.
BD: Nick Oliver has operated all over the world. Do you have any travel horror stories or cultural mishaps that you can share?
NO: Fingers crossed, hardly anything. Worst was being on the sidelines in Russia (Chukotka) while Rod Holcombe went through a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare following an accidentally washed passport and visa. Missed a couple of planes through stupidity and talking too much, that’s about it. The only other mishap was one client from Mongolia who never paid me for a big job – 30 days’ worth – but I heard recently that he subsequently spent several years in jail for fraud, which made me feel a bit better, and his company did let me see rather a lot of that country so I think of that lost income as an unusual tourist experience.
BD: Is there anything that you miss from your academic career? For example, I miss the opportunity to undertake dedicated microstructural study of deposits, something that I feel is fundamentally lacking in many deposit studies.
NO: I miss teaching first years, trying to get that spark of interest going by raving on about chemosynthesis around black smokers and how that relates to the origin of life, the carbon cycle from death to diamonds, and getting them to build volcanoes using peanut butter and strawberry jam on a hot summer’s day to get across the concept of magma viscosity and its connection to plate tectonics. Several other aspects of academia I’ve been able to continue within industry – supervising grad students, running short courses and masters training, and the odd bit of microscope and microprobe work.
BD: We hear all about the advances and benefits of technologies such as 3D modelling, geochemical analysis, AI, and utilization of drones. Have you noted any negative impacts to effective exploration and mining as a result of these e.g. less people out kicking rocks?
NO: Well, it’s a leading question and one that’s been troubling many people. Dick Sillitoe suggests that there is a causative, inverse relationship between eyes on rocks and mineral discoveries. As I get older, I tend to drift towards that idea as well, but I’ve spent too much time learning and understanding through computational geology to really believe it. And in case young readers here think this is just an old-person’s state of mind, Bruce Hobbs today, in his 80s, is one of the true modern pioneers of computational geoscience, having grown up with field-based structural geology at his core. Yet, trying to reverse the decline in fundamental observation skills in the field and core yards is a major part of my consulting/training business, but it gets frustrating at times.
Firstly, there’s no question that geochemistry is fundamental to exploration, and one piece of geochemical software ioGAS is so powerful that it’s been driving a wave of new approaches to geoscientific understanding. I’ve used it directly in a discovery (shame it was in Colombia just before the current political leadership froze the Mining Act). Leapfrog has almost the same impact, but geometry alone doesn’t reveal as much as the quite amazing way ioGAS helps you learn and understand at the same time, at least if you have some geochemistry background. I’ve used, benefited from and transferred the results from geometric and geomechanical 3D modelling over the years. I haven’t directly used drones, but I’ve played with some drone products – not quite ‘there’ yet it seems.
The lure of AI, like previous computational advances before it, potentially takes young geos too quickly through a learning path to the hunt for instant answers, so I’m mostly worried about this in an educational sense – how does it relate to the scientific method? ioGAS takes you on a learning path; no doubt this would be the same for computational/data experts currently using AI, but I’m worried about all the obvious abuses of its widespread accessibility to everyone. I haven’t used ChatGPT yet, as I really enjoy both reading and writing for myself. Probably I’ve been using AI without knowing it, which is also a bit scary. And my stepdaughter, doing an Engineering degree, recently told me that >50% of her class had been picked up for AI-based plagiarism in an assignment, by an academic who specializes in the field. Hard to tell where this will go. Look what the internet has done – great but dangerous, simultaneously benefitting, growing and damaging society – I think AI will follow that path.
BD: Leading on from the previous question, where do you see the most exciting technological developments being made in mineral exploration and mining going forward? Do you think that there are any mineral exploration strategies or technologies that are under-employed, but could make a big difference to an exploration campaign if people used them more?
NO: I suspect the biggest opportunity lies in the better use of teams of people, in a social science sense, without that process being dictated by administrators. There are few people working at this interface, many scientists regard it as ‘soft’. The technical successes I’ve been a part of have largely involved the best teams, rather than the best technology.
Technologically, I think the most important things will be the tools that re-connect people to the rocks. Some recent examples are hand-held spectral tools, portable XRF, and the IQLogger I’ve already mentioned. I think some of these have a way to go, in the difficult area of technology versus education and training so that this machine/human interface doesn’t produce more data with less precision and accuracy (see comments above). Picking decent drill targets at depths deeper than our current comfort zones remains very high priority, and this requires better fusion of surface and shallow structural geology (mostly) with better and better geophysical tools and methodologies. I think geophysics remains inadequately utilized – but it’s mostly not a technical issue – we need stronger inter-personal geology-geophysics links within active exploration teams. There’s often a disconnect with outsourced geophysical contractors not being a core part of exploration teams. I think there are cutting-edge developments in understanding complex and chaotic systems (e.g. research by Ord and Hobbs) that need to be supported to get them to the point where their potential value can be pragmatically assessed – but this requires stronger investment from universities and other research organizations, as well as belief from industry that it might be game-changing. It’s wait-and-see at the moment.
Mining complex orebodies is a very multi-disciplinary area and geoscience research is not well connected to production issues very well. For example, the imbalance between JORC reporting requirements, resource definition modelling and the reality of structurally complex ores is not working very well it seems (but I’m out of my depth on this topic). I think there is a slight over-obsession with micro-chemical analysis in the research sector, partly technologically driven, to the detriment of fundamental experimental science (particularly metal behaviors in fluids). But neither micro-geoscience nor experimental geoscience speak well to the scale of genuine exploration problems unless the teams are prepared to fully integrate that work across multiple scales.
BD: This is a double-pronged question. Firstly, what is your opinion of the geological skillsets, experience, and knowledge of geologists today? Do you perceive a looming skills gap, due to the retirement of many academic and industry veterans, combined with the closure of many earth science institutions?
NO: Young geos today are way more skilled at 3D computational work and data than we were when young. I think they are worse at clearly recognizing the scale of geological problems because the pace of data generation and gathering doesn’t allow much time to think about what the best approach would actually be. But that’s experience speaking. The skills gap isn’t looming, it’s here. It’s glaring in structural geology, which is sad given the legacy of the great structural geologists of the last 50 years, a few of whom are still alive (including a few I’ve mentioned). A lot of the blame is on an uncaring attitude of politicians on both sides of the fence (at least in Australia), but it is reversible – noting an increase in geology enrolments in several countries elsewhere. Maybe the search for ‘critical metals’ will improve matters.
BD: Has there been any single satisfying moment in your career that rates above all the others?
NO: That’s a tough one. Not really, there have been too many golden moments. I’ve been lucky. Perhaps getting a job at Monash despite being a trouble-making grad student there? Standing on top of the Andes? Running a field trip for 75 geos through my doctoral field area in north-west Queensland? Mapping solo on several occasions in 100% exposure?
BD: I’ll ask a question on the flipside of the previous one. Many of us have interfaced with less than savory individuals or experienced toxic workplaces. Has there been any incident or incidents that really disappointed you?
NO: Almost none when I’ve been a consultant. Maybe the one I mentioned before with the completely screwed-up structural drill-core procedures. But I’ve seen so many happy geos and mostly happy work environments that it’s difficult for me to think of seriously disappointing situations. Again, lucky. But there were a few incidents in the last few years I was at JCU that I’ve tried to forget, I was just swamped with work (see the next question) and couldn’t stop a few people from messing up good projects and spreading bad vibes through the team, and the impact of the merger with geography was pretty devastating.
BD: We both know how hard it’s been to try to coordinate time together on a project, due to client and personal commitments. Given the many professional hats that you wear, what is Nick Oliver’s secret to time management, or doesn’t he have one and simply ‘wings it’?
NO: This is hilarious. I’m a shocking example of time management. If I did this better, I would have made more commitment to professional organizations, but I was fairly burnt out after JCU and decided I’d given enough. Maybe I’ll get back to that as I attempt to slow down (after I’m 70?, 80?). My office is a mess. My computer structure is a mess. I rely on a good bookkeeper, accountant and travel agent to keep afloat these days. I don’t like much about organized structures, except that they help me constrain what would otherwise be a chaotic lifestyle. Yeah, so ‘winging it’ probably applies.
BD: Taking the answer to the previous question into account, what does Nick Oliver do in his ‘downtime’? Does he have any favorite hobbies or passions he pursues? Please make this an interesting answer or I will take editorial privilege and make stuff up!
NO: It’s changed over my life, as you’d expect, so here’s a rough chronological order. Military modelling (not dressing up like a soldier, the plastic kits), playing squash, drinking too much with friends, motorcycling, dogs, heavy rock music from the 70s (e.g. Iggy and the Stooges), leatherwork, making verandahs, visiting art galleries (especially modern art or crazy sculpture). Well, I think you can see a pattern there. It’s called ‘attempting to slow down’. Others might call it ‘growing up’ but I don’t know much about that.
BD: 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?
- The origin of cement-supported hydrothermal breccias (Ernest Henry whom I referred to), there’s something we are really missing, and it gets back to the decline in people working on phase separation in geological fluids.
- It would need a huge effort and is probably not worth it, so let’s call it a dream: inserting a full hydrothermal speciation dataset into ioGAS, plus the capacity to recognize and map chaotic behavior, to kick the geoscience world back into geochemical-geomechanical prediction space that finds mineralization (needs about five lifetimes and a few more Cooperative Research Centers) – but this is too hard.
- I try and do anyway, to provide the data and logical reasoning to consider that reworking of older metal accumulations is part of the normal budget of many or most mineral systems. This won’t win Nobel Prizes but over-polarization of ore deposit models doesn’t necessarily drive the science forward, either. This is probably the Old Nick speaking, not the Young Nick.
BD: Finally, any concluding comments or words of wisdom from an industry leader?
NO: What’s the phrase? ‘If you enjoy your work, you won’t work a day in your life’. So, I’ve worked maybe two or three years in my mid-40s and I’m 64. And yeah, go look at some more rocks, it’s good for you.