Taking a look at the contribution of prospectors to mineral exploration in British Columbia (Canada).
The 2019 British Columbia Mineral and Coal Exploration Survey report was recently released by the BC Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources, the Association for Mineral Exploration and EY. They collected information from 29 prospectors and 171 mineral/coal exploration companies representing a total of 326 exploration projects within BC. What was most surprising was that, in 2019, the 29 prospectors surveyed spent over $750,000 resulting in an average of $26,000 per prospector. While in 2018, the prospectors surveyed spent $1.2 million with an average of $36,000 per prospector. The report also mentioned that tracking prospectors is difficult since "many prefer not to disclose work."
There are a few reasons why these numbers are interesting: Prospectors typically are the ones to find deposits and how much work they do could affect the quality and quantity of projects available for further development. For example, the Mt. Milligan Gold Mine in central BC was discovered by prospector Richard Haslinger, of Fort St. James, in 2003 by slogging through the low country while geologists were looking in the steeper traverses of the high country. Prospector's do a lot of the groundwork so that major and junior exploration companies can have the drill-ready projects to satisfy their investors. Prospectors do not typically have investors to pay for the work on their claims such as their wages and equipment. Unlike other provinces and territories, there is no active prospector assistance program offered in BC. There was a prospector program that ran in the 1990's but the next government that won the election discontinued the program in ~2001. In addition to the Federal Programs, there are a Mining Exploration Tax Credit (METC) and the Mining Flow-Through Share Tax Credit for work conducted in BC. While the flow-through share tax credit is for publicly traded companies, prospectors receive some benefit from the METC in the form of a partial tax credit for paid expenses such as fuel and assays. Like most tax credits, however, you have to make money in order to get a see some relief from those expenses.
In BC, if you want to keep your mineral and placer tenures then you need to report the work. In addition, if you are reporting work on your tenures then all the work needs to be reported. This requirement is to discourage cherry-picking results. The work done is published as a report in the Assessment Report Indexing System (ARIS) with a one year confidentiality time period. A spreadsheet is also updated with the basic features of exploration and development work such as claim owners, operators and total expenditures.
Using the current ARIS spreadsheet, updated July 31 2019, the expenses based on claim owners and operators were extracted. Since there is a one year confidentiality date, only data prior and up to 2017 was used.
There are a number of gaps in the spreadsheet, all of which were manually filled using the online ARIS search by the report number and checking the PDF reports for the missing information. The data in spreadsheet format is a great resource and, hopefully, sees some review of the older records in the future, but, because of the numerous gaps, only some years were looked at in detail.
Future work could also take a deeper dive into regions, type of work done, commodity, deposit type and comparing the data with other provinces and territories. In addition, all expenditures were converted to 2002 Canadian Dollars (a feature of the spreadsheet).