Ideon Technologies co-founders Gary Agnew (left), CEO and Dr. Doug Schouten (right), CTO, photographed at Britannia Mine near Squamish, BC
RICHMOND – Clean energy and green futures cannot be reached without first embracing the mining industry. At least, that’s what Gary Agnew, CEO and Co-Founder of mining technology company Ideon Technologies, often reminds people.
“Most people don’t understand the role mining has in our everyday lives,” says Agnew. “The reality is that if we want to transition to clean energy and we do want cellphones and power and all those things that have become essential to modern living, it requires metals. That means doing whatever we can to make metal recovery efficient, safe, sustainable, and economical.”
Ideon is a world-leading mining technology company born and bred in British Columbia. Headquartered in Richmond, the company was founded in 2011 during its incubation at TRIUMF (Canada’s particle physics lab at UBC) but launched commercially as Ideon Technologies in 2020 – right as Covid was set to pause the global economy.
The growing Ideon Technologies Inc. team poses for a photo at the head office in Richmond, BC in May 2024
Persevering through those very challenging pandemic years forged resilience and creativity within the Ideon team, reinforcing its bold ambitions to transform the traditional mining industry with its revolutionary, space-age technology.
“We use the energy generated from supernova explosions in space to image deep beneath the surface of the earth,” says Agnew. “Those explosions create energy that travels through space and eventually interacts with Earth’s atmosphere, generating a shower of subatomic particles.”
One of those particles is called a muon, which Ideon uses as a natural energy source to image the subsurface of the earth. Muons cannot be seen by the human eye, but travel at nearly the speed of light, in straight lines, and penetrate deep into the Earth. Ideon imaging solutions include proprietary detectors that are positioned underground to capture and measure muon activity.
Ideon’s landlord, B.U.K. Investments in Richmond, BC gave permission to drill a 150 m borehole in the parking lot of the International Business Park property, to allow Ideon to test deployment of muon detectors in a safe and controlled way
“Muons lose energy proportionately to the density of the material they are going through,” says Agnew. “We measure their directional intensity from multiple perspectives and then use that data to build a three-dimensional model of the density of various features underground.”
“Imagine you are trying to locate, map, or characterize a geological feature like a mineral deposit, which would be quite dense compared to the surrounding rock. Ideon can delineate that deposit without the need for excessive, expensive, and environmentally damaging drilling, which is how the mining industry has traditionally tried to understand what’s happening in the subsurface.”
If that sounds complicated, it’s because it is. It really comes down to harnessing naturally occurring universal energy to reduce geological uncertainty for those who work underground. It’s a compelling story, one that even appealed to the producers of a popular reality television show.
“We were featured on The Curse of Oak Island, which is a History Channel series filmed on an island off the coast of Nova Scotia,” says Agnew. “Ideon solutions were used there to map subsurface voids consistent with vaults and tunnels used by generations of treasure-hunters.”
Agnew often explains what Ideon does using the analogy of medical imaging, specifically x-rays or CAT-scans – which can delineate density features like bones inside the human body, non-invasively. With capability like that for subsurface mapping, mining companies stand to gain massive economic benefits as the guesswork and risk involved are significantly reduced over their traditional mining practices. The sector is expressing serious interest in what is happening at Ideon, and the business growth has been strong.
Ideon deploys detectors down drill holes from surface (shown here) and in underground mine workings
“We are now working with the top five mining companies in the world, helping them with exploration, resource geology, underground caving, geotechnical applications and more,” says Agnew. “Our team has grown from five to nearly 60 people in the last few years, 90% of whom are located here in BC with other remote team members across Canada and Australia.”
As global governments work towards achieving shared climate change goals, Ideon is well positioned to provide immeasurable value in accelerating the transition to clean energy by facilitating low-impact mining.
“We are building a great BC-based company that supports the major players in the mining industry to implement system-level transformation to help move the world forward, to a renewable energy future” says Agnew.
