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EXPLORATION MAY 2017 • E&MJ; 31 www.e-mj.com • The higher input costs for drilling and geologists during in the boom years." Who Spent What...? A glance at the most recent crop of annual reports is revealing in terms of what some of the world's mining companies spent last year, where and for what. As an ex- ample, Anglo American reported that its exploration expenditure during 2016 was $107 million, down from $152 million in 2015. The commodity-wide decrease was mainly attributable to an overall reduction in drilling activities, the company said. At $32 million, copper was Anglo's largest single exploration target, with the company spending a further $45 million on copper-project evaluation. Diamonds ($29 million) were also high on its agenda, while iron ore exploration received $10 million. Copper was also BHP Billiton's princi- pal target during 2016, with the company spending $161 million during the calendar year on minerals exploration. Its greenfield work is predominantly focused on advanc- ing copper targets within Chile, Peru, Can- ada, South Australia and the southwest United States, the company said. Rio Tinto led the big spenders with its $497 million exploration and evaluation budget last year, down from $576 million in 2015 and $747 million in 2014. "As the next generation of deposits becomes more difficult to find and develop, we continue our focus on exploration," the company wrote in its annual report. "Rio Tinto has one of the largest exploration programs in the industry, and in 2016 we were active in 14 countries across a range of commodities. "In total," the company said, "2016 exploration and evaluation activity cov- ered eight commodities across a range of greenfield and brownfield environments. In recent years, Rio Tinto has shifted the emphasis of exploration expenditure to pro- jects in the OECD and Peru in line with the increasing focus on copper exploration." Specific projects identified in Rio Tin- to's annual report included Roughrider (uranium) in Saskatchewan, Sanxai (baux- ite) in Laos, La Granja (copper) in Peru, and Tamarack (nickel) in the USA. Brown- field projects included work on iron ore in Western Australia and bauxite in the Wei- pa region of northern Queensland, while the company remained in discussion with North Atlantic Potash over their explora- tion joint venture in Saskatchewan. However, Rio Tinto noted that its five- year exploration partnership with Chinalco in China has now ended, and it is retain- ing a presence in the country to monitor exploration opportunities and options for future partnerships. Among the big copper producers, An- tofagasta undertakes early-stage explora- tion with its core operations in Chile, but in response to the depressed copper mar- ket it cut its exploration and evaluation spending from $102 million in 2015 to $44 million in 2016. Internationally, the company reported working on projects in Argentina, Australia, Mexico and Zambia, with exploration in Canada and Australia generating new projects that will be eval- uated during 2017. Meanwhile, Freeport-McMoRan con- tinued with its own budget-cutting, spending just $44 million on exploration last year compared with $96 million in 2015 and $109 million the previous year. Its indicated expenditure for 2017 is around $47 million, with its stated focus being on extensions to its existing mines. ...on What, and Where? According to S&P; Global Market Intelli- gence in its PDAC-linked report World- wide Mining Exploration Trends, gold remained the top-explored commodity in 2016, accounting for 48% of the glob- al exploration budget (See Figure 1). However, in dollar terms gold exploration declined to its lowest level since 2006, dropping 16.3% to $3.30 billion. The company bases its information on data from 1,580 companies, which spent a combined $6.89 billion on exploration last year. In dollar terms, S&P;'s data showed that the largest r-e duction in spend- ing was for base- metal exploration, with budgets for copper, nickel and zinc-lead down 28% from 2015 to a total of $2.1 billion. Within this um- brella figure, nick- el was the metal least in favor as an exploration tar- get, where-as com- panies were less likely to shelve work on lead and zinc projects. S&P; reported that Latin America re- mained the top regional destination for gold exploration, with 26% of the total gold budget. Within the region, Mexi- co attracted the largest gold allocation, followed by Chile, Peru and Colombia. However, on an individual basis, Australia overtook Canada as the top gold explora- tion destination for the first time since 2003, as shown in Figure 2. Over half of the total spent there on gold exploration was targeted at and near existing mines, although Australia was again the top des- tination for grassroots gold exploration. Writing in S&P;'s Corporate Exploration Strategies report, the company's Sean DeCoff noted that the spend on grass- roots exploration fell to a new low of 28% of the total exploration budget last year, while minesite exploration reached a re- cord high of 35%. "Since grassroots spending is asso- ciated most strongly with new discover- ies, the erosion of grassroots' share of the worldwide total could potentially put pressure on future production due to a lack of new discoveries," DeCoff added, pointing out that 2016 marked the third consecutive year in which companies allocated more to minesite work than to grassroots. This is illustrated in Figure 3, which shows the ten-year trends for spending on grassroots, mine site and late-stage exploration. "The decline in grassroots' share of overall budgets since the 1990s cor- responds with the upward trend in the shares allocated to late-stage and mine- Figure 1—Exploration spending by commodity in 2016, as a percentage of total reported budgets. (Source: S&P; Global Market Intelligence)