Vaughan is an Executive Director and founding partner of Aurum Exploration Services Limited, established in 2002 to provide contract and consultancy services to the exploration and mining industry across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and North America. He has over 37 years’ experience spanning target generation, early-stage exploration, drilling programme management, geological modelling and resource evaluation. Vaughan graduated with an M.Sc. in Mining Geology from Camborne School of Mines in 1988. Prior to Aurum, he was Senior Geologist with Navan Resources PLC, managing gold and base-metal exploration in Ireland, followed by work as Senior Mine and Exploration Geologist at the Chelopech high-sulphidation Au-Cu mine in Bulgaria. He also worked on Zn-Cu-Au exploration at Almagrera, Sotiel and Aguas Teñidas in the Spanish Pyrite Belt and the Los Santos tungsten deposit near Salamanca. As Aurum’s Principal Geologist and a qualified PGeo and EurGeol, Vaughan has managed gold resource drilling at Curraghinalt, VMS and gold exploration in Sudan and Greece, lithium pegmatite exploration in the Leinster Massif, Cu-Co-Ni exploration in northern Spain, phosphate resource drilling in Saudi Arabia and, currently, drilling at the Tanbreez REE project in southern Greenland. He recently completed the European Investment Bank study, Challenges and Solutions for Mineral Exploration in Europe: A Technical Report.
Challenges and solutions for mineral exploration in Europe
Raw materials are indispensable for the European Union’s future and mark the very beginning of industrial value chains. The European Commission assess 34 non-energy, non-agricultural raw materials as critical. The Commission’s assessment is based on objective criteria, including economic importance and risk of supply disruptions, a factor that has shot up in importance since the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent increase in trade tensions. Although critical raw materials are mostly produced and used in relatively small quantities, all have special characteristics that make them essential components for products in strategic areas such as renewable energy, digitalisation, aerospace and defence technologies. Well-known examples include rare earth elements found in the permanent magnets used to manufacture wind turbine generators, lithium used for batteries and silicon used for semiconductors. In light of these applications, critical raw materials are key to the economic competitiveness of European industries and to many of the European Union’s climate, energy, digital, defence and strategic autonomy goals. Exploration activity across Europe must ramp up significantly over the coming years and some countries are performing better than others, What measures must Europe collectively take to increase inward investment into the exploration industry to meet the targets of the EU Critical Raw Materials Act targets.
