Toronto-listed Ivanhoe Electric has announced an exploration alliance agreement with the top diversified miner BHP, targeting copper and other critical minerals in the US.

The alliance will explore six mutually agreed areas of interest over 3 655 km² in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

“BHP and Ivanhoe Electric have a common goal to find new sources of the critical minerals necessary to meet growing demand associated with the energy transition and the electrification revolution,” said Ivanhoe Electric executive chairperson Robert Friedland.

BHP will contribute $15-million of exploration capital over the initial three-year term, while Ivanhoe Electric will provide the alliance with access to one of its new generation Typhoon geophysical survey systems, as well as the machine learning algorithmic software and data inversion services of its subsidiary, Computational Geosciences (CGI).

Ivanhoe Electric CEO Taylor Melvin says the alliance is a confirmation of the company’s disruptive exploration technologies and its experienced team of exploration professionals.

“Our teams have been working together to identify the first exploration areas for the Alliance, and we see today’s announcement as the first step in what we expect to be a long and successful partnership between Ivanhoe Electric and BHP,” says Melvin.

Ivanhoe Electric’s Typhoon was developed to identify deep geophysical anomalies in environments that have highly resistive surface conditions and to detect the presence of sulphide minerals containing copper, nickel, gold and silver in areas where potential deposits are hidden by cover and where target depths exceed the range of conventional geophysical surveying systems.

The company believes the next generation of major mineral discoveries in the US will likely be made deep beneath the surface, in areas where younger, unmineralised cover overlays the older underlying prospective geology.

Ivanhoe Electric has deployed Typhoon at its Santa Cruz, Tintic, Hog Heaven and White Hill projects in Arizona, Utah, Montana and Nevada respectively, as well as its 50:50-owned joint venture with Saudi Arabian Mining Company Ma’aden in Saudi Arabia.