Gold was the commodity which attracted the most exploration spending in 2015, despite a year-on-year decline in the global exploration budget, SNL Financial said Thursday.
"In 2015, gold's $3.94 billion allocation made it the top-explored commodity again in 2015, with 45% of the global total," SNL said.
SNL, like Platts, is a unit of S&P Global.
Evaluating capital financings by exchange shows that firms listed on the TSX Group accounted for 55% ($544 million) of the total raised from July 1, 2016, through August, followed by firms listed on the ASX with 30% ($291 million), the company said.
The aggregate $986.5 million raised was significantly higher than the $324 million raised in the same period last year, SNL added.
Drilling activity in the Canada-US region accounted for 39% of all significant gold results announced between July 1 and September 8 this year, with a further 29% hosted by the Asia-Pacific region.
The Africa and Canada-US regions had the highest in-situ values for reported reserves and resources at primary gold projects as of September 8, with values totaling $1.48 trillion and $1.26 trillion, respectively, SNL said.
For gold in non-gold primary projects, Asia-Pacific was the key contributor in terms of resource value, accounting for $692 billion of the total non-gold primary in-situ value.
Revenue, calculated by multiplying 2015 total gold production from primary gold mines with the 2015 average gold spot price, shows Asia-Pacific and Africa as the most valuable gold regions, with gold revenues of $20.22 billion and $16.12 billion, respectively.
With $5.58 billion in investments, Latin America accounted for the largest amount of planned and completed capital spending on gold announced from the beginning of 2015 through June 30, 2016, SNL said.
Canada-US was second with US$5.0 billion, including $1 billion allocated by Barrick Gold to develop the Goldrush project in Nevada.
Earlier this month, SNL released a report showing that major gold miners have significantly shifted their exploration focus over the past decade, favoring increased mine-site exploration at the expense of grassroots exploration.
SNL's profiles of the world's top 20 gold producers showed that from 2006 to 2015, the share of the group's total gold exploration budgets devoted to near-mine work rose from 44% to 54%, while the share allocated to greenfields programs decreased from 40% to 22%.
