Peter Bradshaw turns a small, dark-grey core sample fragment in his hands.
It looks unremarkable, until one notices tiny bright flecks of what looks like silver catching the light. It’s not silver, though – it’s awaruite – a nickel-iron alloy that has been called a naturally occurring stainless steel.
For half a century, Bradshaw has worked as a geochemist in a host of remote regions around the globe, including Papua New Guinea, Bolivia and Guyana, proving up deposits that have become highly profitable gold mines – work that recently earned him a berth in the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame.
At 76, he could retire having achieved more in his career than many of his peers. But Bradshaw thinks he may have more big strike left in him.
And this time he doesn’t have to battle mosquitoes and monsoon rain in some exotic locale like New Guinea.
The awaruite deposit discovered by the junior exploration company he co-founded, First Point Minerals Corp. (TSX:FPX), came from the Decar property, a two-hour drive northwest of Fort St. James.
“Of all the things that I’ve worked on, I see this as the most likely to be a mine,” he said.
Most of the world’s nickel is mined from either laterite or sulphide deposits.
“This is a third form of nickel,” Bradshaw said. “And the advantage is it’s not mixed up with soil, it’s not mixed up with sulphur. It is just nickel-iron, both of which are in stainless steel.”
As far as he knows, no one else is planning to develop an awaruite mine.
“If they are, we sure haven’t heard about it,” he said.
That may be because it’s hard to find.
“It is very, very difficult to recognize in the field,” Bradshaw said. “It’s an obscure mineral. There are very few places in the world where it occurs over a big area.”
First Point found the Decar deposit back in the 1990s. But with nickel prices at $3.50 per pound, it wasn’t economic, so it was kept on the back burner.
Selling for about $6.50 per pound, nickel is now one of the few bright spots in precious and base metals.
“All the experts are reckoning it’s going to go up to about $9 in 18 months or so,” Bradshaw said.
Decar’s potential convinced Cliffs Natural Resources (NYSE:CLF), a U.S. iron and coal miner, to sign an option agreement that gives the company a 60% stake in the Decar property.
“Cliffs came along when we didn’t have a single drill hole into this property,” Bradshaw said.
“No one had ever mined this before. They’re the kind of partner that an exploration company needs because they have the financial muscle and the engineering muscle.”
But, as Bradshaw is well aware, proving a deposit and developing it into an operating mine is a monumental task filled with risk.
“If you look at 1,000 prospects, maybe 100 are worth doing further work on. Of those 100, maybe 10 are worth doing detailed drilling. Of those 10, maybe one becomes economic. Most people, if they’re directly involved in one or two discoveries in their lifetime, they’ve done quite well.”
Bradshaw’s involvement in four successful discoveries is what helped earn him a place in the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame on January 15.
Born and raised in Campbell’s Bay, a small lumber town on the Ottawa River in Quebec, Bradshaw discovered at a young age that he enjoyed working in the field.
A high school friend’s father was a geologist named Duncan Derry – a fellow hall of fame inductee – who spoke at his school and inspired him to go into geology.
“I knew I wanted to be in the scientific area, because I can’t spell,” Bradshaw said.
That may be a bit of an overstatement. Bradshaw has written a technical book on geochemistry (Conceptual Models in Exploration Chemistry), co-written another and just recently finished the draft for a book on the innovations of Tony Barringer, a Canadian geophysicist whom Bradshaw spent a decade working for.
“Tony Barringer was absolutely an amazing guy. He was strictly a geologist by training, but he had a phenomenal grasp of chemistry, and physics and electronics and fabrication.”
One of Barringer’s innovations was an airborne geophysical surveying system that was credited with finding a dozen new mines.
After getting his geology degree from Carleton University, Bradshaw ended up in England, where he earned a PhD in economic geology from Durham University.
Immediately upon getting his doctorate, Bradshaw and two friends bought an old van and went on a three-month adventure – driving from London to Pakistan and back.
He then ended up at the Royal School of Mines in London, where he taught for four years.
It was there that he met Tony Barringer, who had been a visiting professor. Barringer offered Bradshaw a job, which brought him back to Canada. He spent 10 years with Barringer Research.
“Half my job was doing research with him and the other half was consulting for many companies,” Bradshaw said. “I basically consulted around the world, in Africa and Latin America in particular.”
In the late 1970s, he joined Placer Development Ltd. The Vancouver mining company, which became Placer Dome, was eventually bought out by Barrick Gold Corp. (TSX:ABX).
One of the projects Placer was working on was in Papua New Guinea, which required Bradshaw and his wife, Maggie, to move with their six children to Australia.
While with Placer, he was instrumental in finding and proving out the deposit that led to the construction of Papua New Guinea’s Porgera gold mine.
Placer had planned to build an open-pit gold mine, but the quality of the deposit it had zeroed in on turned out to be too low, and the company was prepared to fold its tent and write the project off.
But Bradshaw knew there was gold in those hills, because it was evident in local streams. Placer just wasn’t looking in the right spot.
Despite investor frustration with the project, Bradshaw managed to raise enough money to explore another nearby zone.
“I got the money together to have one more kick at the cat,” he said. “We found a very high-grade underground zone, and that turned Porgera from a rock heap into a mine.”
After he left Placer, he and several other former Placer colleagues formed Orvana Minerals Corp. (TSX:ORV), which owns copper-gold mines in Bolivia and Spain.
After returning to Canada, Bradshaw began working with the University of British Columbia and was instrumental in establishing the Mineral Deposit Research Unit in 1989. The facility helps industry work with researchers.
Bradshaw had been with Orvana for eight years when he was approached by a group of investors to start his own company. He and partner Ron Britten formed First Point Minerals, which went public in 1996.
First Point is focused exclusively on awaruite properties. It owns five in B.C., one in the Yukon and two in Norway, but its Decar property is closest to being developed into a mine. It’s still early stages, however. The company has just finished doing a preliminary economic analysis. But Bradshaw believes a mine could be built within five years.
In addition to being chairman of First Point Minerals, Bradshaw sits on the board of Aquila Resources Inc. (TSX:AQA) and remains active with the Mineral Deposit Research Unit.
