Can digitised colonial records unlock the DRC’s mineral exploration potential?

The Democratic Republic of Congo is seeking greater access to historical geological records held in Belgium as it looks to exert greater control over the information underpinning its mineral wealth.

The archives, held at Belgium’s AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, contain geological maps, surveys, field notes and mining records relating to the Congo’s mineral resources. Their potential value has gained renewed attention as governments and mining companies seek new sources of critical minerals and explore new ways of using historical geological information.

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But the value of those records is not straightforward. Klaus Eckhof, who has been exploring in the DRC for around 25 years, examined the Belgian archive with his team in 2004–05. His conclusion was blunt: “there’s nothing really which is, let’s call it, very helpful”.

The episode explores whether advances in artificial intelligence and other technologies could now change that equation, with Australian company RadiXplor developing tools to extract exploration intelligence from historical geological records.

In this episode of Energy Technology, mining editor Alejandro Gonzalez speaks with Junior Nsimba Badila, founder of Mukuba Minerals Forum, Klaus Eckhof, a veteran DRC explorer (and CEO of DRC Gold Corp), and Russell Menezes, CEO of RadiXplor, about resource sovereignty, international investment, geological archives and the emerging role of AI in mineral exploration.

Why does the DRC want its geological archives?

For Badila, the issue begins with resource sovereignty. “The priority is sovereignty. You’re free to control your own resources,” he says, arguing that greater access to geological information could also support higher government revenues, infrastructure investment and community projects.

Eckhof’s experience offers a contrasting view. His team spent three to four weeks in Brussels examining the archive, which was largely made up of paper documents, books and old maps. “We tried to find something out of those ones, but that didn’t generate anything of substance for us,” he says.

Making use of historical records: the challenge

The question is whether the problem lies with the information itself or with the tools available to interrogate it. Menezes encountered a similar challenge in Western Australia, where the WAMEX archive contains around 200 years of exploration information in “scanned PDFs, handwritten formats, scanned maps”. His response was to build RadiXplor.

Digitisation and AI-driven geological research

The challenge extends well beyond one archive. Menezes says an industry-wide estimate suggests that around 90% of information remains in unstructured formats, while even Western Australia’s highly developed geological information systems leave much pre-2000 data in scanned PDFs. “I know that some tier one companies who have been trying to digitise this for the last 20 years, but have still only scraped the surface,” he says.

Menezes argues that the problem is not simply digitising documents but making their contents usable. Even conventional optical character recognition can introduce errors, but RadiXplor’s AI can recognise misspelt geological terms and retrieve relevant information despite those problems. In one example, the system can recognise “G U L D” as gold.

The potential comes from scale. Menezes says analysing Western Australia’s roughly 10 million pages of reports would take 100 geologists more than a lifetime. By combining the RadiXplor platform with large language models and AI agents, he says the same exercise can now be completed in weeks.

Who will drive this effort?

The podcast also examines how international investment is shaping the DRC’s mining outlook. Badila points to China’s involvement in the country since 1999, while noting that Western interest accelerated as the global race for critical minerals intensified. He also highlights Chinese infrastructure investment in the country.

Eckhof offers a different perspective, arguing that Western and Chinese investors have operated with very different time horizons. “They have a 30, 40, 50 year view or 100 year view,” he says of Chinese investors, compared with what he describes as a much shorter horizon in Western exploration.

Despite the technological advances, Eckhof remains sceptical that digital tools can substitute for fieldwork. Asked about the role of US-based companies relying on digital methods, he responds: “You have to be on the ground, you have to walk the ground, you have to look at the rocks”.

The discussion therefore comes down to a question of what technology can add to, rather than replace, conventional exploration: can modern AI make historical geological information more accessible without removing the need for geological judgement in the field?

A new kid on the block: critical minerals

Menezes argues that growing demand for critical minerals is changing how governments view their historical geological information. Countries including Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are increasingly looking to digitise archives and use them to attract investment. “Historical data is, I think, increasingly being viewed as a strategic asset now than simply an archive,” he says.

The DRC’s efforts to gain greater access to its geological past therefore sit within a broader shift in mineral exploration: as technology improves, information collected decades ago may acquire a new value, not because the geology has changed, but because the ability to interrogate the record has.

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