I'll start off with an example.
I made a point about carbonatites, which are basically complexes made up of calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate. I won't go into the details of the geology, but it's a particular type of geological setting. We probably have about 90 of them in the country. Most of them are remote, while some of them are actually fairly close to infrastructure, and they're grossly under-explored.
If I think of the carbonatite complex that is best explored at the moment, it's probably the Ashram deposit in northern Quebec. Resources have been defined and the company has gotten in there, but the challenge now is to provide the infrastructure needed to get it out of there.
The next challenge is how to tell the difference between a good carbonatite and a bad carbonatite. We have 90 of them. It turns out that our research has shown that there are key signatures that will allow us to distinguish carbonatites that have the potential for a mineral resource.
I don't want to bore you with a lot of science, but let's take this idea very simply. If I take a carbonate liquid and I look at the concentration of niobium and rare earths in it, it turns out that this liquid dissolves huge concentrations of these elements, so our challenge is actually to get them out.
How do we get them out? The model that we've been developing shows that if these carbonatites interact with their host rocks, the carbonate part is consumed, and you end up with a residue that concentrates these rare metals, so we can actually go in now and start to see the signatures that will distinguish between fertile ones and barren ones.
The whole challenge for the exploration community is that we haven't been exploring for these elements for a long time. In the case of copper or nickel, we've been doing it for years, so we have good exploration models; we don't have them for rare earths and niobium.
I'm suggesting that our group is developing them. I'm excited about Lackner Lake simply because we see the right signatures there, and it is close to infrastructure.