Gold remains the main commodity of interest for the exploration industry, accounting for 43% of exploration budgets in 2014, says mining and environmental consulting services company The MSA Group principal consultant Mike Robertson.

He notes that, since the mid-1970s, gold exploration expenditure has averaged around 30% of total exploration expenditure, making gold the commodity of choice in terms of exploration.

However, as gold exploration expenditure is cyclical and largely tracks the gold price, it dropped by 53% to $4.6-billion in 2014, compared with an all-time high of $9.7-billion in 2012.

This significant drop is the result of a combination of global economic volatility, a decreasing gold price since late 2011, bearish investor sentiment resulting in junior explorers finding it difficult to raise funds, and producers reducing exploration and capital spending to improve their financial margins.

Traditionally, the junior exploration industry was responsible for at least half of the new gold discoveries, as this sector focused to a large extent on greenfield and early-stage exploration; however, this has slowed down dramatically.

“. . . we are in a commodity- cycle downturn and we have been for the last couple of years, which followed a 10- to 12-year upcycle,” says Robertson, adding that the group is noticing that the market is starting to bottom out and expects next year to be better.

He explains that commodity price increases will drive exploration efforts and funding and, therefore, activity in the exploration space is expected to increase during 2016.

The average grade of new discoveries, as well as operating mines, is also declining with time. Deposits are becoming more difficult to find and it is taking longer to bring new mines into production. Discovery costs are also doubling every decade.

With exploration becoming more challenging in terms of the trend towards exploring under cover, new thinking is required for the best mineral search solution.

Robertson states that geophysics and deep drilling are standard methods used to find buried deposits.
He says that new exploration technology is mainly focused on pinpointing gold deposits at depth and determining their attributes to define drilling targets.

New techniques, such as low-level geochemistry, are useful for picking up low but anomalous concentrations of elements in the soil. An additional technique being developed in Australia is the detection of trace amounts of gold in samples on site at the drill rig.

“Future exploration success requires good science, and technological and funding innovations,” notes Robertson, adding that technological innovation needs to focus on developing new discovery criteria and techniques, and how to better transform data into knowledge.

New techniques allow for exploration companies to target their drilling more efficiently and spend their exploration dollars more wisely.

Robertson further points out that globally, over the past decade, Africa stands out as the continent with the highest number of gold discoveries, the second-lowest unit discovery costs, and the best value per exploration dollar spent.
This is mainly owing to the continent’s high mineral potential in regions that are still underexplored in global terms, for reasons such as political and infrastructural constraints. These regions include countries in Central and West Africa such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Côte d'Ivoire, which have seen significant recent gold exploration successes.