Since 1960 juniors spent about $61 billion on exploration in Canada - 36 percent of the total exploration spend - and made about 45 percent of total discoveries
Junior vs. Senior - Discovery performance in charts
Mineweb.com EXPLORATION
We take a look junior performance in Canada, versus seniors, through research provided by Richard Schodde over at Minex Consulting.
Author: Kip Keen
Posted: Tuesday , 26 Nov 2013 HALIFAX, NS (MINEWEB) -
In a
recent presentation Richard Schodde over at Minex Consulting draws a striking picture of the performance of juniors and seniors in mineral exploration in Canada and abroad. We thought it worthwhile sharing a few of his graphs (with his permission) that draw a clear picture of the importance of juniors in the Canadian exploration scene.
The summary statistic is this. Since 1960 juniors spent about $61 billion on exploration in Canada - 36 percent of the total exploration spend - and made about 45 percent of total discoveries, Schodde says.
Here we see the raw spending, seniors versus juniors:
In recent decades it's apparent that junior spending has skyrocketed, a fact that can in part be attributed to the increasing power of the personal computer. Bare bones companies, starting in the 1980s could compete with majors in the exploration game.
Discoveries followed the money:
We see that juniors made many of Canada's discoveries in recent decades, indeed, most of them in the past 10 years. Often exploration is a fruitless task, however. You spend money and find nothing and this is evident Schodde's overall ratio of total exploration spend to the value of discoveries. For juniors this was 0.89.
Typically, it's the rare, major discoveries that make for massive returns (though not only). This is evident in the next graph where Tier 1 discoveries - big ones - drive Schodde's estimates of discovery value far above what was spent. Juniors in the past decade have ruled this roost (yellow bars=value created, red line=spending) making most of the big discoveries.
Where do we go from here? Metal prices dominate the exploration cycle in Schodde's analysis (though there are other contributing factors) and he extrapolates future exploration spending in a variety of gold price scenarios. His general sentiment: the sky isn't falling. Taking $1,200 an ounce gold, he forecasts exploration spend to average about $1.3 billion a year in Canada in the coming years. That's well off 2012, a banner year. But historically speaking, it's still quite a healthy level.
Credit: Minex Consulting
Read the article online here:
Junior vs. Senior - Discovery performance in charts - EXPLORATION - Mineweb.com Mineweb
