Where the rubber ( opinion ), meets the road ( reality ).
Exploration expenditure in Australia during 2020?
$2,792,800,000
Exploration drilling in 2020?
10,630,200 mtrs.
That gives us a round figure of $262 per metre.
I assume that means from ‘that ground looks interesting’ to ‘the drill core etc analysis has been compiled and here it is, dear investing public’.
Ardea holds a tenement portfolio of app. 4,000 sq klm’s.
Let’s use the 40mtr x 40mtr proving method as an example.
Each square kilometre requires 625 drill holes ( 25 x 25 ).
Let’s use 100 mtrs depth as an example.
That gives 62,500 mtrs drilling per square kilometre.
Lets get those samples to the lab and back. Let’s get that info together ready for the accountants etc at a cost of $262 a mtr from start to finish.
62,500 x $262 = $16,375,000 per square kilometre.
Now times $16,375,000 by 4,000
Even just 16,000,000 times 4,000.
It might just me be but using the calculator between my ears I get $64,000,000,000 to get every bit of our ground to a 40 x 40 mtr standard of proof.
For the tired? That’s sixty four billion dollars.
Now do we start to understand why drilling is done quite carefully and a good deal of time can be taken when deciding how to drill ( method ), where to drill ( location ), and how much to drill ( depth )?
Do we also understand why anything less than an amazing find during sterilisation work ( my assumption is that such work is only done in areas a company thinks holds very little worth exploring ), is it followed up?
Do we lastly understand why sirgold’s ‘we found gold during the initial sterilisation work and therefore moved to a different site which we must again do sterilisation work on equals we found gold yadda yadda yadda’ comes off as a bit strange to me?
We’ve raised less than 40 million.
Proving every piece of ground- converting resource to reserve- could theoretically cost upwards of 60 billion which is at least 15,000 times the money we’ve raised.
Now we see why miners prove sufficient ground to get going and then just keep digging until the viable minerals run out in which ever direction the dig is headed.
Anything rose just makes no sense at all. In fact it would probably sink almost every mining project mankind has ever attempted.
More than happy to have these figures corrected if a concise explanation is included- I rounded $272.79 to $272 when dividing the money spent by total exploration metres. This has been a bit of a learning exercise for me.
https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/minerals/investing-in-australian-mineral-exploration/exploration-statistics
(20min delay)