Mining Weekly

PERTH (miningweekly.com) – South Africa’s Minerals Council was working with the government to develop a national exploration strategy within the next six months.

Speaking on the sidelines of the last day of Paydirt’s Africa Downunder conference, in Perth, Minerals Council CEO Roger Baxter told Mining Weekly Online that the exploration strategy would be focused on greenfield discoveries.

“The Minerals Council has already established a taskforce for this and in the next month we will come up with a draft view on this strategy, which will feed into the government process.”

Baxter told delegates that in 2017, South Africa only accounted for 1% of total global expenditure, compared with both Canada and Australia, which accounted for 14% respectively, and the rest of Africa, which accounted for a combined 13% of exploration spend.

Of the capital invested in exploration within South Africa, only 10% had been geared towards greenfields exploration in 2017.

Baxter told Mining Weekly Online that the national exploration strategy, once finalised, would make it easier to find funding for greenfield exploration. International venture capital funds would be the preferred source of the financing required to fund this exploration, Baxter said, with funds in Canada, Australia and the UK being of particular interest.

“The geological prospectivity of South Africa remains significant. We know where the platinum deposits are, where the gold is, and where a lot of the good diamond deposits are. But large parts of the country remain under-explored for modern geotechnical techniques.”