Backed by Australia’s biggest resources investors and in Partnership with traditional owners of Alaska, Australian discovery specialists MDF Global have just struck a critical minerals exploration deal of unprecedented scale, marking one of the largest generative exploration programs in the history of Alaska.

MDF Global is a team of highly accomplished geologists and dealmakers who specialise in identifying tier-1 metals discoveries and developing them into successful resources businesses.

The Australian mining veterans have secured a fully funded, 5-year alliance with one of Australia’s best-known mining billionaires and the traditional owners of Alaska. This critical metals exploration program will cover up to 10 million acres of the most prospective regions in the US state, have access to $10’s millions of private data and has secured funding for the 5-year program.

Unlocking the datasets, exploration rights and equity partnerships attached to lands that have been largely off limits for half a century will be a treasure trove for the team around MDF Chairman John Main, the former Head of Rio’s North America Operations who has discovered over $100 billion of metals deposits.

We will soon open an institutional capital raise for MDF Global and will allow wholesale investors an opportunity to invest. Click here to request the offer docs. We expect this offer to open and close next week.

MDF Global – Australian mining veterans building global tier-1 assets

A combination of world-renowned geologists and mining dealmakers, MDF Global is a critical mineral discovery business with a focus on creating tier-1 assets that can feed the world’s hunger for copper, other electrification metals. McKinsey is forecasting a 6.6Mt copper supply gap by 2031, and their skills are desperately needed.

The team at MDF has proven capabilities across the entire mining lifecycle from greenfield discovery, through its resource build out, economic assessment and financing stages, and into production. The combination of their geological expertise, commercial acumen and ability to forge strategic partnerships sets the stage for an exciting era of MDF’s operations.

In just a few short years since their founding, during which time they have already paid out more distributions to investors than the total amount of capital they’ve raised, MDF have assembled four heavily mineralised assets into a portfolio that barely scratches the surface of the amount of land that has just entered their control.

MDF business is now transitioning multiple assets to resource expansion and economic studies, as well as securing a 5 year fully funded generative program, at a time when the commodity appears set to launch into a fundamentally driven supercycle.

Robert Friedland, Executive Chairman of Ivanhoe Mines and also the discoverer of the 168ktpa Oyu Tolgoi copper mine, has stated “The shift towards renewable energy and electric vehicles will require unprecedented quantities of metals like copper, nickel, and cobalt. Meeting this demand poses significant challenges in terms of resource availability, environmental stewardship, and technological innovation.”

Between 2018 and 2050, the world will need to mine 115% more copper than has been mined in all of human history to meet the transition – and this could be a conservative figure. The planet needs world class operators like MDF to be sifting through as many data sets as possible in order to find this supply, which was a driving factor behind why they were able to land the Critical Metals Alliance deal in Alaska.

The expertise and strategic relationships that MDF has developed, particularly in Alaska where the team’s close relationship with the state’s traditional owners’ corporations has been crucial, have already borne plenty of fruit. There is now a carefully curated lineup of projects that have been discovered and acquired by MDF to aid in the supply of critical minerals that are crucial to Earth’s energy transition targets.

Reach Markets will soon open an opportunity for institutional investors and are giving some of our investors the opportunity to invest side by side. Click here to request offer docs.  

Copper demand set to explode

Annual world copper demand is expected to double from 25Mt in 2022 to a whopping 50Mt in 2035, creating an annual deficit as much as 9.9Mt. These figures might sound distant, but the undersupply is slated to hit markets in 2025, and the world has recently got a taste of what a sudden and slight shortage can do to the copper price with its surge above US$11,000 in May, rallying 25% in just half a year.

The race to net-zero is threatening to upend commodity markets to an extent so severe that it is concerningly unprecedented – and copper is especially vulnerable. Ageing mines, dismal copper discovery rates, insufficient recycling technologies and inept substitutes paint a picture of a brutal journey for the world to meet its sustainability targets that are built around electric vehicles, power infrastructure, and renewable electricity generation.

Most of MDF’s assets are held in private vehicles and backed by some of Australia’s most sophisticated mining investors. MDF has a growing pipeline of assets being prepared for the upcoming metals boom. For instance, Copper Bay Resources boasts a 153 Mt copper-gold-molybdenum resource open in multiple directions. It presents a rare opportunity with a porphyry copper deposit of scale and grade from the surface. MDF has been collaborating with Copper Bay to define the economic pathway for the project. Spoilt for options, Copper Bay aims to establish an economic starting project (producing over 50K tonnes of copper per annum, open-pit, with initial grades up to 1% copper) and to demonstrate the project’s additional scale potential.

Goldman Sachs sees the need for a US$13,000/t copper price in order the stimulate the US$150 billion in growth capex that must go into the ground before 2030 in order to meet demand, noting the increasing unlikelihood of this occurring as well as concerns around 50% of the shovel ready projects they assessed in 2018 extending their initial production dates by an average of three years during during this four year period.

We will soon open a wholesale capital raise for MDF Global. Click here to request the offer docs.

Copper supply is not keeping up – the opportunity for MDF

But it’s not just exploding demand driving this deficit. The supply that many major producers and investment banks are adamant is required for the energy transition just isn’t there, which provides the perfect opportunity for the likes of MDF Global to find new sources of copper.

Robert Friedland, founder and executive co-chairman of Ivanhoe Mines, has been quoted stating – “We’re heading for a train wreck here. My fear is that when push finally comes to shove – copper can go up 10 times.”

The rate at which major copper discoveries are occurring has been drastically declining over the past decade. Of the 228 major copper deposits discovered between 1990-2021, which contained 1.18 billion tonnes of copper in reserves, resources and past production, just 12 were discovered during the past decade and contained only 60.5Mt, or 5.2%, of all copper discovered since 1990.

Despite the increase in copper exploration budgets over the past several years, there has not been a meaningful increase in the number of recent major discoveries.

Copper exploration has become extremely inefficient from a dollars to tons perspective. In 1990, US$528.9 million was spent on copper exploration, which resulted in the discovery of 70.2 million tons of the metal, at an average implied discovery cost of US$7.5/ton. In 2012, which recorded the highest ever annual copper exploration expenditure at US$4.7 billion, a mere 0.8 million tons was discovered at an average implied discovery cost of US$5,596/ton.

Reach Markets will soon open an opportunity for institutional investors and are giving some of our investors the opportunity to invest side by side. Click here to request offer docs.

MDF’s Competitive Advantage and the Bigger Picture

MDF has a jump start on the rest of the market when it comes to copper, and it is likely that a few years down the road companies will have to be paying up for high quality projects where the fortunes have already been made.

In addition to unlocking the inherent value of its current assets, and commencing the 5 Year Critical Metals Accelerator program, MDF has been actively finalising plans to replicate its model into multiple jurisdictions globally, focussing on metals with fundamental supply/demand deficits.

This is an opportunity to invest in some of the best geos and deal makers – backed by some of the biggest investors – looking for the tier 1 projects that will help the world transition to renewables at a time where there is a huge deficit of new tier one copper and critical metals discoveries.  If you are interested, click here to request offer docs. We would expect the offer to open and close next week.

Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.