Assessing the Exploration Risk

Abstract

The techniques for assessing the exploration risk were developed mostly by the oil industry and are regularly used there. The probability factors are considerably less precise in metal exploration, and therefore a quantitative estimate of the exploration risk is in most cases extremely doubtful. For example, current experience indicates that the success rate of drilling wild cat holes in the oil industry is about 27%. There is no similarly high success rate for the metal exploration industry. A rule of thumb used in Canada for many years claimed that one deposit is found after about 45 000 line-km of airborne electromagnetic surveying, and this figure could be used to estimate the exploration risk (Sect. 21.4). Subsequently, over a period of many years, no mineral deposits were found by airborne electromagnetic surveying (Wellmer 1983d), and clearly this method had been applied to saturation level. New ore deposits were then discovered only after other exploration techniques were improved, and these techniques obviously have quite different success statistics.