Sessions Chair

Rob Stevens and Eaun Gray

Session Overview

Gain practical insights into the market trends shaping key mineral and metal commodities, including gold, copper, lithium, nickel, and critical minerals. This session will examine exploration activity, supply and demand outlooks, and the market drivers influencing investment and development, helping investors, explorers, and mining companies identify opportunities and position for future growth.

Sessions Chair

Valerie Wilson and Francisca Maepa

Session Overview

This session reviews the world's major copper porphyry belts and their most significant recent discoveries, giving a current picture of where the next generation of copper supply is likely to come from. The session will outline the geologic features, such as vein type, alteration zonation, and metal distribution, that distinguish economic, high-grade deposits from sub-economic systems, drawing on case studies from the Andes and other major porphyry provinces. The session will present practical discovery vectors that de-risk exploration targeting and help investors evaluate project quality.

Sessions Chair

Francisca Maepa and Antoine Caté

Session Overview

The PDAC 2027 Technical Session will showcase exploration case studies from across the global mineral industry. This program brings together multiple presenters who will share state of the art geoscience and technical innovation to make new discoveries and advance projects. Attendees will learn about case studies, innovative methodologies, and the geological insights behind successful projects. The goal is to move beyond theory and deliver practical, experience based guidance on successful mineral exploration in diverse geological and operational contexts.

Sessions Chair

Rosmery Cardenas

Session Overview

Latin America hosts some of the world's most important mineral systems, yet exploration success requires navigating diverse geological settings and complex jurisdictions. Through case studies spanning covered terrains, Andean belts, regolith-hosted systems, and development-stage projects, this session examines the key drivers of mineral discovery and project advancement across the region. Presentations highlight modern mineral system approaches, vectoring techniques, and targeting strategies that help identify, de-risk, and advance concealed mineral deposits.

Sessions Chair

Rob Hearst

Session Overview

Examining case histories and technological advancements in exploration geophysics.

Sessions Chair

Brooke Clements and Barbara Scott Smith

Session Overview

Despite facing serious headwinds from the effects of global economic uncertainty and competition with synthetic diamonds, approximately US $10 billion worth of natural diamonds were produced in 2025. Talks in the session will address the current status of operating diamond mines, future diamond markets, synthetic diamonds, the Indian diamond business and the future of De Beers, the traditional industry leader.  

Sessions Chair

Antoine Caté and Natalie Chu

Session Overview

Mining meets AI returns following the success of the 2026 session, continuing the conversation on how AI is transforming mineral exploration and development. Attendees will gain practical insights on how AI can be incorporated into their own projects to improve efficiency, reduce risk, enhance targeting, and support better decisions.

Sessions Chair

Gary Agnew and Doris Hiam-Galvez

Session Overview

Every industry eventually discovers it has been measuring what is easy to collect rather than what determines success. Baseball learned it the hard way — the story behind the 2011 movie Moneyball — when teams that measured what predicted winning beat those still trusting the scout's eye. Mining is world-class at grade, intercepts, and cost per metre, and far weaker on other key drivers of the outcome: density, structure, rock competency, depth continuity, recovery behaviour, and uncertainty itself. So, exploration chases what looks familiar, mines get designed around the de-risked fraction rather than the full orebody, and projects reach production without hitting the numbers that financed them. Is mining measuring what is easiest to collect, or what determines value?

Sessions Chair

Charles Beaudry and Doris Hiam-Galvez

Session Overview

Exploration for unconformity uranium deposits in Saskatchewan will be highlighted in addition to talks on in-situ uranium mining in the US as well as recent exploration advances in South Australia.  Industry explorationists and investors will leave with a clear understanding of the cutting-edge innovations shaping the future of uranium exploration and mining.

Sessions Chair

Antoine Schwartzmann and Ryan Dhillon 

Session Overview

One of the most anticipated sessions each year, this showcase spotlights the freshest economic discoveries and major project revivals across the mining sector. The session features advanced projects backed by compliant resources, along with a select group of early-stage discoveries where exceptional drill results, scale potential, or market momentum make them too compelling to ignore.

Sessions Chair

Robert Fetell and Ryan Dhillon 

Session Overview

Rare earths are the cornerstone of the energy transition, advanced manufacturing, and national defense — yet the West remains overwhelmingly reliant on non-market, state-controlled supply chains. While capital is mobilizing, bankable projects remain scarce because markets are small, investment criteria are unclear, and technical, financial, and policy stakeholders rarely align. 

This session convenes developers, investors, off-takers, OEMs, policymakers, and processing specialists to share lessons learned, assess feedstock and processing economics, and identify practical pathways to diversify and de-bottleneck Western supply, grounded in real-world projects across the Americas and Australasia.

Sessions Chair

Volker Moeller and Marc Bardoux

Session Overview

Major shear zones host a significant proportion of gold deposits globally. The session will focus on the regional and deposit scale controls on ore formation and explore examples from prolific shear zones, such as those in the Abitibi Greenstone Belt, Hope Bay, West African Birimian Greenstone Belt, the Guiana Shield, the Central Asian Orogenic Belt and the West Tethyan Metallogenic Belt.

Sessions Chair

Ray Goldie and Valerie Wilson

Session Overview

The session will provide a comparative overview of the world's major silver-producing regions, examining the deposit types that characterize each district and the exploration strategies most likely to deliver success — from the five-element vein systems producing bonanza-grade native silver in Australia, to the epithermal and sediment-hosted deposits of Latin America, and the carbonate-hosted ores of central Europe. A key theme of the session is silver's nature as a by-product metal. Because silver is most commonly recovered during the processing of other metals, its economic value is inseparable from the mineralogy of its host deposit. Smelters will typically pay for silver contained in copper, gold, and lead concentrates — but recovery and payability fall sharply for silver in nickel concentrates, and may be negligible or nil for silver locked in zinc concentrates. Accurate project evaluation demands a clear understanding of these metallurgical realities.  Finally, we plan to provide a data-driven outlook on silver supply and demand fundamentals, above-ground inventories, and price drivers, offering perspective to the audience beyond standard sell side forecasting.

Sessions Chair

Keith Spence

Session Overview

The session will examine the fundamentals of mining valuation as well as techniques and new developments in valuation standards and methods. 

Topics covered include; exploration projects, PEA’s, quantification of political risks, adjusting for social risks, choosing appropriate discount rates, real options, AI and development projects.

Sessions Chair

Sasha Mitrofanov

Session Overview

This session examines how some technical studies have drifted from rigorous technical documents toward promotional material — covering key areas of expertise — and equips investors and technical specialists with the tools to read between the lines, identify the red flags, and separate genuine technical rigor from studies designed to impress rather than inform.