The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 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 push forms the centrepiece of a new episode of the podcast Energy Technology, which examines whether emerging technology can transform decades-old archives into a genuine tool for mineral exploration.
The records in question are held at Belgium’s AfricaMuseum in Tervuren.
They include geological maps, surveys, field notes and mining records compiled during the colonial era, and their potential value has drawn fresh attention as governments and mining companies search for new sources of critical minerals.
In the episode, mining editor Alejandro Gonzalez spoke with Junior Nsimba Badila, founder of the Mukuba Minerals Forum, veteran DRC explorer and DRC Gold Corp CEO Klaus Eckhof, and Russell Menezes, CEO of the Australian firm RadiXplor, about resource sovereignty, international investment and the emerging role of artificial intelligence in mineral exploration.
For Badila, the issue is fundamentally about control.
“The priority is sovereignty, you’re free to control your own resources,” he said, adding that improved access to geological information could help lift government revenues and fund infrastructure and community projects.
Eckhof, who examined the Belgian archive with his team in 2004 and 2005, offers a more sceptical account.
After three to four weeks in Brussels sifting through paper documents, books and old maps, his team came away largely empty-handed, concluding that little in the collection proved genuinely useful to their exploration work.
That scepticism raises a central question for the episode: “does the shortfall lie with the underlying information, or with the tools historically available to interpret it?”
Menezes encountered a comparable problem in Western Australia, where the WAMEX archive holds roughly 200 years of exploration data in scanned PDFs, handwritten notes and old maps.
That challenge led him to found RadiXplor, an AI platform built to extract usable exploration intelligence from unstructured historical records.
According to Menezes, an industry-wide estimate suggests around 90 per cent of geological information still sits in unstructured formats, a problem that persists even in a jurisdiction as well documented as Western Australia.
He noted that some major mining companies have spent two decades attempting to digitise their archives with only limited progress.
RadiXplor’s approach goes beyond simple digitisation, using AI that can recognise misspelt or garbled geological terms, in one case correctly identifying “G U L D” as gold.
Menezes said analysing Western Australia’s roughly 10 million pages of exploration reports would take 100 geologists longer than a lifetime using conventional methods, but that combining the platform with large language models and AI agents can now compress that work into weeks.
The episode also explores the geopolitics shaping the DRC’s mining sector, including Chinese investment dating back to 1999 and more recent Western interest driven by the global race for critical minerals.
Eckhof contrasted the long-term outlook of Chinese investors with a shorter horizon typical of Western exploration firms, and argued that despite technological progress, fieldwork remains irreplaceable, insisting exploration still demands walking the ground and examining the rocks directly.
Menezes framed the shift in broader terms, suggesting historical data is increasingly viewed as anasset rather than simply an archive.
As governments from Saudi Arabia to Kazakhstan pursue similar digitisation efforts, the DRC’s push for its own records reflects a wider recognition that old geological data may hold new value, not because the geology itself has changed, but because the tools to interrogate it finally have.