How much exploration has been reported to DMPE against the ground each company holds today. Bubble area is the money. Colour is how intensively it was applied to the ground held, so a large bubble low on the scale is a big budget spread thinly across a lot of country.
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| # | Company | Exploration spend | E licences | Ground held | $ per hectare | $ per licence |
|---|
Only the exploration line items on the Form 5: exploration activities, prospecting, and Aboriginal heritage surveys. Rent, administration and mining activities are excluded, because they are the cost of holding ground rather than of looking at it.
E licences carry about a quarter of all reported exploration spend in WA. Mining leases carry roughly three quarters, but most of that is resource-definition and grade-control drilling inside operating mines. This is the greenfields end of the business.
An exploration licence can be one block or seventy, so a per-licence figure compares budgets against very different amounts of ground. Minimum expenditure is set per block, which makes area the denominator the obligation itself uses. Per-licence and per-hectare are both available above.
About 12% of live exploration licences are co-held. Spend is apportioned by each party's registered shareholding, so a five-party iron ore joint venture appears as five different-sized bubbles rather than five identical ones.
Nothing in the register records corporate ownership, so the groupings are maintained by hand. Rio Tinto holds through eight registered entities and Northern Star through thirteen. Companies marked group in the table are rolled up.
It measures what has been reported against the ground each company holds today, not what each company spent in a given year. Surrendered licences are deleted from the register along with their whole expenditure history, and live exploration licences turn over at about 13% a year, so roughly a quarter of the licences that existed two years ago are not in this data at all. What is missing skews to dormant ground, which is what gets dropped, so the totals are a floor rather than an estimate.
Expenditure history stays attached to a tenement when it is sold, and the register keeps no record of who incurred it, so a company that bought ground after the reporting year is credited with the previous owner's spend. That is correct for a question about ground and wrong for a question about companies, so where it is material the company is marked inherited.
Expenditure reaches the register when the Form 5 is lodged, which happens through the year on each licence's own anniversary. Completed years are effectively fully lodged. The year in progress is not, and is deliberately not offered here.
Around 160 licence holders are named private individuals rather than companies. They are counted in the totals but are not charted or named.
The Exploration Intensity layer shades every live tenement by spend per hectare, alongside expiry timelines, dealings and compliance. Free account to browse the register, Premium for the intelligence layers.