BHP Group’s programme to support promising minerals explorers will expand beyond copper and nickel to prospective uranium and lithium projects from September, the head of its Xplor programme said on Wednesday (Apr 5).

For its first year, the Xplor accelerator programme chose seven projects around the world to support for six months from January 2023. The projects fit with BHP’s portfolio – copper and nickel – and are key to the energy transition.

The miner expects the world to need twice the amount of copper by 2030 than what is produced this year, and four times the amount of nickel by then.

For its second year, the programme wants to receive double the number of applications – or five hundred – as it did for the first year, as it opens up to more commodities, said Sonia Scarselli, vice-president of BHP Xplor.

“We will be looking not just at copper and nickel, but at uranium and lithium and so on,” Scarselli said at a commodities conference in Singapore.

She added that the Xplor programme has been successful, as it offers financial and strategic support to minerals explorers and helps them with connections, while BHP gains exposure to new ideas and geological deposits that may struggle to access bank funding because they are too novel or early-stage.

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BHP has provided US$500,000 each to Nordic Nickel, Tutume Metals, Asian Battery Minerals, Impact Minerals, Red Ox Copper, Bronzite Corp and Kingsrose Mining.

The industry in general is suffering from a decade of underinvestment in exploration and must hurry to catch up if it is to meet the demand challenges of decarbonisation, she noted.

Last month, she told Reuters that BHP found that lithium’s demand-supply equation was not as fundamentally stretched as that for copper and nickel.

BHP chief executive Mike Henry has maintained that the world’s biggest miner has no appetite for lithium, because its relative abundance made it impossible to gain a strategic position in a long-life, low-cost deposit.

The miner, which produces uranium as a by-product at its Olympic Dam copper operations in South Australia, has become more vocal about the role of uranium in a new energy world. REUTERS