As clear as a rock — the Dean Tuck & Dreadnought story

Dean Tuck’s journey to becoming a significant figure in critical mineral exploration in Western Australia is inspiring. After leaving university just six months in due to feeling unfulfilled, the US ex-pat and future CEO of Dreadnought Resources happened upon a meeting in a nearby pub that would eventually pave the way for a successful career in the resources industry, marked by several life-changing discoveries.

Tuck arrives early for our interview — straight off the plane from his company’s Mangaroon rare earth project near Exmouth in Western Australia. “Everything seems to be going pretty well up there,” he tells me while settling on a rickety café bench opposite.

Great to hear because this founding CEO of Dreadnought Resources will be putting shareholders out of their collective misery next month when he pulls the trigger on a resource upgrade on its Yin Ironstone Rare Earth discovery within the Mangaroon project which could blow its current JORC 2012 Exploration Target at just over 14 million tonnes out of the sky.

“We are looking for a resource intensity of 4.8Mt/km to within a range of 50-100Mt at 0.9-1.3% TREO but our region and ground could easily reach 100Mtpa at 1% TREO,” Tuck speculates.

TREO stands for Total Rare Earth Oxides, and that’s where the money is as long as a) you can extract it and b) it has a lot of NdPr.

“And there will be a high proportion of neodymium and praseodymium, or NdPr, which is what the market wants,” Tuck says after sipping his newly arrived flat white.

I asked him what led to him discovering geology after all those years.

“I realised I was never going to be an engineer,” Tuck recalls bluntly.

“It involved a lot of engineering and calculus, and I soon realised I didn’t have the capacity for the mathematics involved. So, after a year and a half of floundering around on campus, trying to do engineering, math, calculous and all the rest, I finally found geology, which was a big awakening moment for me because I’d found something that I absolutely loved, which ironically had been staring me in the face my whole life.”

Dreadnought CEO Dean Tuck at the Yin rare earth discovery in Western Australia’s Gascoyne.

That foundational discovery would be the first of many in a successful career in resource exploration spanning 15 years of the typical ups and downs of the industry, including working with some of the best companies and minds in Western Australian resources of the era.

I had the pleasure of meeting Brendo at a local pub called KKs, where I got to know some new acquaintances quite well.

“I was introduced to Brendo, a man with a thick and bushy beard, after his return from exploring Mineral Resources’ Wonmunna project in the Pilbara. This was in 2007 when I first learned about the plentiful job opportunities for geologists in Western Australia. There was a high demand for geologists at that time.”

Smelling a geologist in the room, his newfound friend had him in front of his boss from Talisman Resource, the now late Harry Cornelius, dressed in a tee shirt, thongs, and hat for the most informal of interviews. Then, before he could down another pint, he was reading books about drilling for minerals in the Pilbara while logging results as a geologist for Talisman Mining at its Wonmunna, now mined by Mineral Resources. And the rest is well-documented history.

The tale is thoroughly chronicled, yet the real marvel lies in the groundwork that has propelled Tuck towards greater accomplishments in the field of discoveries. I found discovering the diverse life factors contributing to his success fascinating.

Since announcing the Yin discovery in June last year, you have published an astounding amount of material news. How do you keep up the pace?

Getting caught up in stuff that doesn’t matter is a trap many geologists fall into. Exploration is simple: define targets and drill targets. To do that effectively and efficiently, geologists need to focus on what matters and what can be mapped – that’s our job, and the hard part is doing it right. With the exploration process simplified to its core components, we can focus on the exploration strategy, a numbers game in its simplest form. A prospect, once defined, has a 1 in 10,000 chance of becoming something significant. So, you work in greenfield terrains as we do. In that case, you need to generate many prospects and continually test them, turn them over, and learn from that feedback loop to generate better and more robust targets for testing. We want to constantly try targets (to make that discovery and at least produce some learnings). While we are doing that, we want to continually generate new targets to which we can apply our improved understanding.

And if we do the above correctly, then that also means you are constantly testing your best targets, and you can’t be afraid to kill your favourites – a trap many lifestyle companies or overly attached explorationists fall into. We often joke that the targets we like the least are probably the ones that will be the big discovery!

Being prepared to give up on an idea is bloody hard – I know that first-hand as a long-suffering journalist. How did you learn that discipline and courage?

I have been blessed with some fantastic geological mentors over the years, but more fundamentally, my upbringing in a family of geologists, teachers, coaches and military personnel. My grandfathers both served in the American armed forces their entire lives instilling in me a respect for discipline and courage.

Couple that with my mother being a geologist and earth science teacher and my father being a history major and coach who played professional baseball in his younger years, and you get a love of science, in particular geology, and more discipline and courage from sport and more importantly teamwork because teams make all discoveries.

This discipline and courage manifest as a work ethic. Growing up, my father said that no man is above any work. He would say, “Who saves more lives, a doctor or the garbage man?” Before I was old enough to drive, I worked in construction and pouring concrete, which I did throughout high school and university.

How have these influences manifested in exploration work?

I spent five years doing a science fair research and competition through high school; my mom, with her teaching background, would say that you genuinely understand your material once you can explain it to a 5th grader. As we discussed earlier, that would influence the focus on keeping exploration simple, effective and efficient. Combine that with the love of history, research and desire to build a fantastic team, and you have the core ingredients of our exploration work.

At Dreadnought, we specialise in greenfield exploration. The most extraordinary value-creation event in the resources industry is making a significant discovery. While in Western Australia, I’ve watched as Tropicana, Nova Bollinger, Julimar, Hemi, Degrussa, and others did just that. And while many people will say that the best place to make a discovery is in the shadow of a headframe, that’s only true if you own the headframe. Each of the above is a significant discovery in a new province that had been unloved or poorly explored.

The Yin exploration team, led by Dean Tuck at the centre.

So we look at the areas on the map that geologically should have deposits but don’t, and then dive into the history to try and understand why not. And that history isn’t just the historical mine records (which are often limited in unexplored areas); it’s sitting and talking with the pastoralists, the native title owners, going to the state library and digging through old newspapers looking for that little nugget of encouragement to have the courage to go in big—the marriage of science and history.

Mangaroon is an excellent example of this; we can see in the mine records that gold had been found and mined by pastoralists from the 1960s to the 1980s. In speaking with the pastoralists and their descendants, like Drew Money and Alan Macdonald, we learned that they also had found nickel and copper. Digging further back in the newspapers, we knew that in the late 1890s, 1910s and again in the 1930s that the region had been calling out for a state battery to encourage further gold prospecting and development. Still, that state battery has yet to materialise, which has a significant disincentive to early exploration. So now we have this region with obvious mineralisation potential that was thought to be barren and never explored properly, quite simply because there was never a shadow from a headframe to explore within. And despite our success there to date, we have only just begun to unlock that region.

Successfully driving this exploration process and feedback loop since our inception has been the main driver for increasing a $3 million market capitalisation of less than half of 1c a share when we started in 2019 to $50 million on the back of our high-grade gold discovery, Metzke’s Find. The intersection of massive sulphides in the holes at our Orion Prospect in the Kimberley got us to between $80 and $100 million. Then Mangaroon was always there, bubbling away in the background, as one of three projects on the go, which has got us where we are today. We’ve delivered some significant shareholder returns to date and will continue to do so as we advance our exploration efforts.

ASX: DRE Dreadnought Resources

Please note the following valuable information before using this website. 

Independent Research 

Market Open Australia is intended to be used only for educational and informative purposes, and any information on this website should not be taken as investment advice or guidance. It is important to conduct your own research before making any investment decisions, which should be based on your own investment needs and personal circumstances. Any investment decisions based on information contained on this website should be taken in line with independent financial advice from a qualified professional or should be independently researched and verified.