20 November, 2009From The Daily Reckoning Australia Port Phillip...

20 November, 2009

From The Daily Reckoning Australia

Port Phillip Publishing
Attn: Daily Reckoning Australia
PO Box 899
Braeside
VIC 3195

Tel: 1300 667 481
Fax: (03) 9558 2219


In part reads ...


From Dan Denning doing the Moonwalk:

--Alright, here's the first question we're going to close the week with: is the boom in exploration and capital spending on Aussie resources a sign of another top in the commodity cycle, or a sign of higher commodity prices to come? In today's Daily Reckoning, we take up that question and much, much more.

--Marius Kloppers had his numbers wrong. He said there were 74 resource projects in Australia at an advanced stage worth $80 billion. Yesterday, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) said it was 74 projects for $112 billion. That's a 67% increase from this time last year. Is it inflation? Or just Gorgon?

--These were projects already in the pipeline before the commodity price correction of 2008. The Gorgon gas project off the Northwest Shelf alone is a $43 billion project (nearly 40% of the total). Energy projects make up 38 of the 74 projects and 72% of total capital spending - which is why in both Australian Small Cap Investigator and Diggers and Drillers, Kris and Alex are recommending both conventional and unconventional energy shares.

--But usually the companies doling out billions in new cap ex are larger companies with deeper pockets. That doesn't mean they aren't shares you want to own, or that their share prices aren't correlated with rising commodity prices. But we reckon you're going to find bigger cap ex related gains from the companies getting some of the contracts related to projects like Gorgon. These are the "pick and shovel" companies of the cap ex spending boom.

--Or you can look at the other end of Resource City, to the explorers and developers. ABARE reports that last year set another record in resource exploration spending in Australia. Some of it was brownfield exploration (old sites or mines being redeveloped) and some was greenfield (brand new sites or mines). All up, there was $6 billion in exploration spending in Australia last year.

--More than half of that was a frenzy of small companies drilling for new oil. $3.8 billion was spent on petroleum exploration. That tells you what the industry thinks about oil prices: they are going higher. Coal exploration spending was up 27%, with iron ore exploration up 30%.