Smart rocks and sharper minds how Australia’s data-driven explorers are redefining rare earth and vanadium discovery for the clean energy future

If you thought mining was all about brute force and big rigs, think again. The next wave of Australia’s critical minerals boom isn’t being driven by bigger excavators, it’s being driven by data, discipline, and a new generation of geoscientists who see more in a spreadsheet than a satellite map.

That much was clear at the AusIMM Critical Minerals Conference 2025 in Perth, where the “REE and V Exploration and Discovery” session brought together some of the sharpest minds in mineral systems science. Rare earths and vanadium might not make headlines like lithium, but they’re the unsung heroes of the energy transition, and if this session proved anything, it’s that Australia’s potential is far from tapped.

The new explorers: scientists, not speculators

Let’s start with Dr Gabriel Berni from CSIRO, a man who can make mineralogy sound like poetry. His talk, “Multiscale mineralogy of clay-hosted REE deposits in Western Australia,” showed that the real gold in exploration these days isn’t gold at all, it’s knowledge.

Gabriel and his team looked at two Western Australian deposits, Splinter Rock and Balladonia, and did something deceptively simple but incredibly powerful: they studied them at every possible scale, from satellite imagery to mineral grains under a scanning electron microscope.

“If you start wrong in defining your sampling domain,” he said, “you’ll be wrong all the way through.” It’s the kind of sentence that should be stitched on a wall in every exploration office in the country.

What he showed is that clay-hosted rare earth deposits are a geologist’s tightrope walk. Get the boundaries wrong between transported cover and in-situ regolith, and your model, your metallurgy, and your economics will all be off. Using tools like HyLogger-3, X-ray diffraction, and TIMA mineralogy, Berni’s team mapped those transitions with the kind of precision that could shave years off a development schedule.

Splinter Rock, for example, turned out to host REEs in secondary phosphates and carbonates, the result of Cretaceous weathering. At Balladonia, the story flipped: REEs sit in fine clays and titanium oxides in old palaeovalleys, a geological twist that makes in-situ recovery potentially viable.

It’s nerdy, it’s technical, and it’s the kind of stuff that turns good explorers into great ones.

Geochemistry meets AI: when the data start talking back

If Berni’s talk was mineralogical jazz, Dr Tobias Bamforth from Monash University was pure data rock. His presentation, “Defining regolith-hosted REE deposits using multivariate whole-rock geochemistry,” made a convincing case that machine learning is the new geologist’s intuition.

Tobias and his team analysed more than 3,000 samples from Splinter Rock and used k-means clustering and principal component analysis to let the data speak for themselves. The results were stunning, the chemistry grouped itself into stratigraphic layers that perfectly matched the geology.

In other words, the computer guessed the geology before the geologists did.

He showed how certain element anomalies, like cerium oxidation trends, can signal where the magnet rare earths (neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium) are most concentrated. “We can use geochemistry not just to understand these systems, but to predict them,” he said.

That’s not just clever science. It’s the kind of breakthrough that could let explorers model kilometres of hidden mineralisation without sinking a single hole, something that matters when every drill metre costs four figures and every environmental approval takes months.

Jupiter rises: the new rare earth heavyweight

Then came Dr Natalee Bonnici from Critica Limited, who didn’t so much present as drop a bombshell. Her talk, “Jupiter Rising – Unearthing Australia’s Largest Clay-Hosted REE Deposit,” was the kind of story that makes junior explorers weak at the knees.

In under two years, Natalee and her team turned a geophysical anomaly into a world-class resource, 1.8 billion tonnes at 1,700 ppm TREO, including a high-grade core of half a billion tonnes. It’s now Australia’s largest clay-hosted rare earth deposit.

The secret? Open data, quick thinking, and a refusal to overlook the obvious. “We have incredible public datasets in Australia,” she said. “The trick is knowing how to read them.”

Critica started with old CSIRO and Geological Survey data, spotted a standout anomaly, and followed it up with smart drilling and mineralogical testing. What they found wasn’t just a deposit, it was a whole new geological system.

“The Jupiter Intrusive Complex,” she explained, “wasn’t part of the Big Bell Suite as everyone thought. It’s a brand-new alkaline intrusion, and it’s likely the source of the mineralisation.”

In other words, they didn’t just find a mine, they found a model.

Big data goes national

If Jupiter proved what smart exploration can do locally, Dr Jessica Walsh from Geoscience Australia showed what it can do nationally. Her project, “A national-scale assessment of clay-hosted REE mineral system potential in Australia,” might sound dry, but it’s one of the most exciting developments in modern exploration.

Jessica leads the ADARER project, short for Accelerating Development of Australia’s Rare Earth Resources. It’s a collaboration between Geoscience Australia, CSIRO, and ANSTO, and its goal is ambitious: map the geological fingerprints of REE systems across the entire continent.

“We’re using hybrid models that blend geoscience and data analytics,” she explained. “By statistically mapping the conditions that favour REE enrichment, we can reduce exploration risk and cost.”

In plain English: she’s teaching Australia’s rocks how to talk to each other.

The result is a predictive map that identifies regions where the right geochemical and regolith conditions align, even in places where no mineralisation has been discovered yet. It’s not about luck anymore. It’s about likelihood.

“The next decade of discovery won’t come from looking harder,” she said. “It’ll come from looking smarter.”

And if that line doesn’t end up on a T-shirt, it should.

The vanadium wildcard

Closing out the session was Adrian Buck from Measured Group, whose paper, “Critical Minerals Group Lindfield Project Case Study: Geology, Exploration and Vanadium Resources,” reminded everyone that the clean energy future isn’t just about rare earths, it’s also about vanadium.

Tucked away near Julia Creek in northwest Queensland, the Lindfield Project sits within the Toolebuc Formation, a vanadium-rich shale sequence that stretches for hundreds of kilometres. Adrian calls it “the missing link in the renewable energy chain.”

Vanadium is the secret ingredient in vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs), the heavy-duty, long-duration batteries built for grid storage. “Vanadium doesn’t compete with lithium,” he said. “It complements it.”

Critical Minerals Group has already defined a JORC-compliant resource of 713 million tonnes at 0.32% V₂O₅, and is now progressing toward feasibility studies. With rail, road, and processing infrastructure nearby, Lindfield is shaping up as one of the most development-ready vanadium projects in the country.

It’s not glamorous geology, it’s black shale and grit, but as Adrian pointed out, it’s precisely the kind of resource that could anchor Queensland’s battery minerals strategy.

The big picture: precision, not speculation

What made this session so compelling wasn’t just the data or the discoveries, it was the philosophy. Every speaker, in their own way, echoed the same truth: the era of “drill and hope” is over.

The new exploration mindset is one of precision over speculation. It’s about using mineral systems science, multiscale mapping, and machine learning to target the right rocks before the first hole is drilled.

In a world where critical minerals define national security and industrial policy, that’s not just clever, it’s essential.

Australia’s advantage isn’t just what’s in the ground. It’s who’s above it, scientists like Berni, Bamforth, Bonnici, Walsh, and Buck, who are proving that the real breakthroughs in mining aren’t happening in the pit, they’re happening in the data.

So next time someone tells you the age of exploration is over, tell them this: it’s not over, it’s evolving. And the explorers of the future? They’re holding laptops, not pickaxes.

In short:
At the AusIMM Critical Minerals Conference, the future of exploration looked less like luck and more like logic, and for rare earths and vanadium, that might be Australia’s smartest discovery yet.