Tom Woolrych

Tom Woolrych is an economic geologist who invests in junior mining discoveries for a living. He leads project generation and portfolio management at Deutsche Rohstoff AG, a Frankfurt-listed German investment group known for backing, building and selling resource companies, and he developed "GeoAlpha", a geology-first framework for valuing exploration stocks. Resource investors should pay attention because he shows his screening work in public, breaking down how he judges discovery-stage juniors on programs such as CrashLabs' Digging for Dollars, Money of Mine and Resource Talks.

Woolrych has more than 20 years of international exploration and mining experience. He began at Geoscience Australia and Fugro Airborne Surveys in Perth, interpreting airborne geophysical data, and went on to co-author peer-reviewed research on Zambia's Mumbwa district, a copper-gold system of the iron oxide copper-gold (IOCG) type — large deposits where copper and gold sit in iron-oxide-rich rock. He also authored Rocks, Fossils and Formations: Discoveries Through Time (CSIRO Publishing, 2023), an introduction to geoscience. In September 2026, San Lorenzo Gold (TSXV: SLG) appointed him technical advisor for its Salvadora gold project in Chile's Atacama region, after he held the stock as a long-term shareholder.

His method is methodical rather than mystical. He starts with the address: in a 2024 Resource Talks case study of Founders Metals' Antino gold discovery in the Guyana Shield, he argued that "greenstones are the backbone of world-class gold discoveries", comparing the belt to West Africa's gold-bearing Birimian rocks. He then builds his own 3D geological models to test whether high-grade drill intercepts connect into a coherent body instead of isolated spectacular hits. Corporate quality completes the checklist: funded drilling, a clean share structure, and a team suited to the project — plus the discipline to exit, because "we fall in love with projects and always see the upside", as he puts it.

On a June 2026 episode of CrashLabs' Digging for Dollars, he laid out his framework for finding Tier 1 wins, including why he adds a third dimension to the Lassonde Curve (the industry's classic curve of how a junior's value rises and falls from discovery through production) and why he believes knowing what you own is the only real edge in a difficult market. His current focus spans gold and copper discovery stories across the Americas and West Africa, with Chilean gold in the mix through his advisory work.