Speculation is a key word in the spaces and processes “upstream” of mining projects- prospecting and mineral exploration, the focus of my research. Existing literature on the Canadian mining industry is primarily concerned with projects at the extractive stage (e.g., Deneault and Sacher 2012, Imai et al. 2017). The small body of geographic literature focused on exploration has often viewed it as a means for accumulating wealth via speculation- where accumulation happens at a future point (e.g., Gilbert 2020, Kneas 2016, Tsing 2011). My research reveals the delineation of a deposit as a point of accumulation. I focus on the ways that exploration is framed as speculative and what that does, highlighting the ways that speculative capital and the current conversation about renewable energy are emplaced and embedded in ‘distributive systems’ (Taiwo 2021), even as these systems are obfuscated from. I argue that the finance capital relied on by the Canadian mining industry is emplaced and part of a settler-capitalist distributive system and I demonstrate how this distributive system is disappeared through the framing of speculation. Drawing together literature on speculative capital and storytelling, I argue that when exploration is framed through speculation the distributive systems that shape speculation are hidden, and I argue that processes of exploration can be understood as a method by which elite wealth is reproduced. While explorers and investors tell a story of themselves as speculative and risky, creating an investable deposit– or the image of an investable deposit– produces and reproduces relationships and wealth having effects beyond a future mine.