Stelar Metals Ltd (ASX:SLB) CEO Colin Skidmore and his team are harnessing their extensive exploration experience to unearth the critical minerals needed to decarbonise our economy and transform our energy systems globally.
Zinc, copper, nickel and lithium are just some of the minerals Stelar has in its sights - resources desperately needed for zero-carbon technologies and drastically deficient in global supply.
“If it's in the battery metal space, I have comfort that we’re doing something worthwhile,” Colin Skidmore explained, “It’s not mining for no reason at all – just to make someone rich – it's mining to save the planet.”
Fortune favours the bold
An eye for detail, an easy laugh and a taste for adventure.
Those traits are the foundation of a successful career in mineral exploration, if Colin Skidmore’s experience is anything to go by.
Colin grew up in the UK and began his education at one of the great British boarding school institutions, where he might have one day become a good English lawyer or accountant were it not for an irreconcilable difference of opinion with the school board.
Having parted ways with the UK schooling system, Colin looked for another path forward.
“At the time, there were two jobs on the board: grave digger or diesel mechanic. I didn't get the job as a grave digger,” he chuckled.
“So, I became a diesel mechanic, did my indentured apprenticeship and having completed that I realised that, you know, 1950s old buses and coaches, whilst intrinsically interesting, are not a really good career choice.”
After trying his hand at a number of trades – building boats and beachfront houses for the rich and famous among them – and wandering from continent to continent, Colin arrived in Australia as a backpacker.
One day, on an Adelaide beach, he met a girl and decided it was time to pick a direction for his life.
“Because I like building things, I thought, ‘Oh, I'll become an engineer, a civil engineer’. As part of that, I just picked up geology as material science, because I thought it would be useful one day,” Colin recalled.
“As soon as I started doing geology, the penny dropped. 100% on exams, got the Premier's Award, and then went on to Adelaide University where Pasminco awarded me a scholarship.
Phoebe · Geology encompassess so many things
“So, at the end of the day, it was just natural that I moved across and went into exploration with Pasminco.”
Nothing ventured, nothing gained
Three or four weeks into his job at Pasminco, fresh out of university, Colin made his first exploration discovery.
“It was a tenement no one wanted to work on because it was the furthest from the office. Accidentally, they had found a little bit of gold,” Colin said.
Being a zinc-lead company, Pasminco wasn’t generally searching for gold but an error on an assay form marked for gold (Au) instead of silver (Ag) led to an unlikely hint.
“I was playing with the resident geophysicist in the office, looking at some gravity data, and there were two big lows, and, in the middle, there was a saddle and a gravity high,” Colin remembered.
“So, we thought, let's go and draw that.”
It didn’t take long for the intrepid junior explorer and the resident geophysicist to design a drill hole to test the gravity anomaly.
“To be honest, it's probably the best time I've ever had. It [the drill hole] went into an iron oxide copper-gold system. It was 76 metres of over 1% copper with gold as well.
“That was a big hit. And certainly, my first attempt.”
After Pasminco, Colin eventually became vice president of exploration geology for Uranium One, working in Canada, then South Africa and Kazakhstan.
“Being the exploration geologist, I was the one who was sent in to do the due diligence,” he explained.
Phoebe · Colin, can you go and make sure that it's worth the money?
Over the next decade or so, Colin moved from one company to the next, filling exploration and geologist roles for PepinNini Minerals, Investigator Resources, Core Exploration (now Core Lithium Ltd (ASX:CXO)) and Mining Plus before eventually retiring to his goat farm and holiday accommodation business in Tasmania.
It wasn’t until Stelar Metals formed in November last year that Colin re-joined the industry with the promise of contributing to a better world.
Measure twice, drill once
With a market capitalisation of $6.94 million, Stelar is a far cry from the mining giants Colin once worked alongside.
A smaller company with a smaller budget requires a different kind of focus, especially when exploring greenfield ground.
“Major mining companies make boardroom decisions on the other side of the world, start a load of work, spend lots of money and then just drop the ground,” Colin explained. “And that produces opportunities for us.”
“For small companies, lean and mean is the name of the game. The money gets spent in the ground.
“We take away a lot of the internal company politics and priorities and just try and dedicate it to the right areas.”
Phoebe · The other big thing to be successful is that rigor of QA and QC
“As long as the prize is going to be big enough, it's worthwhile doing,” Colin emphasised.
“But as you're drilling it, make sure you collect every single little piece of information that could be required should this ever go ahead to mining.”
Stelar Metals is applying that rigorous method to five projects in South Australia: Evelyn Dam (copper-gold), Linda (zinc-lead and copper), Torrens (copper-gold), Barratta (copper) and Gunson (copper-gold).
The company is also reviewing several other projects, mostly in Western Australia, prospective for more battery metals like copper and lithium.
Despite the eye to acquisitions, Stelar is set on remaining a strictly exploration-focused company.
“It's often small companies that find something that's not quite big enough to ever find or attract a partner. That's when you get forced into mining, and often it doesn't work, and it all goes quite pear-shaped,” Colin cautioned.
“So, that's where I would see Stelar heading; being a dedicated exploration company, finding new things, taking it through to pre-feasibility and seeking partners to come in and merge, join or acquire.
“That's the nature of this industry.”
Toward a brighter future
Mining gets a bad rap among environmental circles – often for good reason.
The reality is that we need these critical minerals to tackle the greatest environmental challenge our species has ever faced: removing toxic hydrocarbons from our energy system and halting the devastating cascade of climate change.
Zinc, copper, nickel and especially lithium will be absolutely necessary to achieve that feat.
“At the current rate, we can't meet the global supply demands. Zinc is something which was poorly explored for many, many, many decades,” Colin highlighted.
“There were existing mines that were producing. Those existing mines are exhausted, they're over.”
For years analysts have been predicting incoming globe-wide shortages of battery minerals.
The copper, zinc and uranium industries, in particular, are suffering from years of underinvestment and recent spikes in demand have sent explorers and miners alike scrambling to find more of these metals.
“Some of us try to do it right. We want to protect the environment,” Colin stresses.
“We want to go and find things that can help people move across to electrification, electric cars, windmills, as opposed to the reliance on the old technology, which, as it turns out, was not quite as good as we'd all hoped.
“I'd much rather be looking for something that the world actually needs rather than something that just makes people rich.”