Mining Futures : Predictions and Uncertainty in Swedish Mineral Exploration

Sammanfattning: Any forward-oriented enterprise must somehow manage the challenges posed by uncertainty and with its distant temporal horizons, high stakes, and low probability of success, mineral exploration is a good illustration of this general rule. Based on a combination of interviews, observations, and archival research, this thesis investigates how explorationists use predictions to manage the material complexities and the uncertainties that contribute to determining the future minability of mineral deposits. Using data from industrial mineral exploration in Sweden, the thesis traces the production and use of predictions across the exploration process, from its early explorative phases to its development into a techno-economic hybrid in advanced stage exploration. With the aid of a detailed study of the valuation processes involved in measuring and predicting the future minability in exploration projects, the thesis demonstrates how risk management in mineral exploration relies both on a continuous addition of measurements and data on different dimensions of “risk” and the bracketing of any uncertainties unaccounted for in exploration practice and standards. Moreover, the thesis shows how industry standards provide explorationists with repertoires of values that are called upon in order to justify predictions as accurate and precise depictions of the future. However, the thesis also demonstrates how justifications of predictions in mineral exploration are not only about prediction correctness, but also about the merits of realizing the predicted future as explorationists are shown to actualize values expressed in contemporary debates to justify the benefits of a mining future. Lastly, the thesis also shows how predictions are used in explorationists’ interactions with their publics. To accomplish this, the thesis outlines how investors, governmental agencies, and other actors upon whom explorationists depend on for resources such as capital and legal permits use second-order metapredictions to determine whether to invest in or grant permits to a project. Moreover, the thesis also highlights how these metapredictors are invited by explorationists to co-create the predicted mining future while other affected parties are left out. Together, the findings reported here demonstrates not only the way predictions are used in uncertainty management and the epistemic challenges involved in making predictions, but also the social and political implementations of how predictions are used not only to make claims about the future, but also how explorationists and their associates use predictions to claim the future for themselves.