Marko Komac

   

Board Member
INTRAW Observatory

BIO

Marko is a geologist with over 27 years of experience in companies, teams and project management, research, networking, and international cooperation. He possesses excellent organizational, leadership and negotiation skills in international and multicultural environments. He also has experience in external affairs dealing with GOVs, international NGOs, and industry.

For eight years he was the Director General of a governmental R&D organisation – Geological Survey of Slovenia.

From 2014 on, Marko has acted as an independent consultant in the field of GIS and spatial data systems, and has taken on several managerial roles – CEO in a start-up company and Managing Director of OneGeology global initiative, which brought together the digital geological maps from around the globe.

In addition, he was and is currently engaged in several EU funded projects as an in-house consultant of the European Federation of Geologists and the International Raw Materials Observatory, working from project inception to project development and implementation.

Over the last years he has been involved in evaluating scale-up mining related projects for EU EIT RawMaterials and been involved in several mining/geology projects for the World Bank in Nigeria and DRC.

He is the Treasurer of the International Raw Materials Observatory, the Past-President of the European Federation of Geologists, Past-President of EuroGeoSurveys, and Past-Vice President of IUGS.

As an associate professor, Marko lectures two GIS.

BLOOM project - Liberation analysis for optimizing extraction and processing of CRMs

The CRM Act poses EU’s challenges and needs to the extractive and processing industries: improve and facilitate access to CRM, reduce dependency, increase circularity, ensure recycling and recovery, achieve sustainability, remain competitive, socially responsible and economically efficient. The BLOOM project, funded from Horizon Europe programme, aims to develop and demonstrate extraction and processing technologies to facilitate exploitation of the primary CRMs. Envisaged are collaboration with Ukraine and Canada, clustering with similar projects, and developing an efficient exploitation strategy. BLOOM will tackle these challenges by facilitating exploitation of raw CRMs (minerals and metals only), by increasing the efficiency of extraction and processing with a smart and modular solids analysis system based on an online MLA (Mineral Liberation Analysis) that includes a sensor based on LIBS (Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy) technology. Such system, which uses MLA and AI processing of accurate mineralogy information from the site, is immediately applicable to extraction operations, as it helps optimise advanced control loops in different stages of processing at mining sites. Its aim is lowering costs of extraction and processing, increasing financial viability, and contributing to making low-grade deposits profitable, thus enabling access to new supplies.