Exploration

Ashish Vaidya, a Rio Tinto geologist, examines a drill core sample taken from a diamond exploration site in Bundelkhand, India.

Expenditure on exploration in 2006 was US$345 million, an increase of US$81 million over 2005, reflecting an increase in contractor costs, the high quality of projects in the Exploration pipeline and the acceleration of evaluation on significant projects.

Exploration in 2006 focused on advancing the most promising targets across the spectrum of grassroots and near mine programmes. Encouraging results were obtained from a number of locations.

The Exploration group is organised into five geographically-based teams in North America, South America, Australasia, Asia and Africa/Europe and a sixth project generation team that searches the world for new opportunities and provides specialised geological, geophysical and commercial expertise to the regional teams. The Asia team was formed in 2006, reflecting a significant expansion of exploration effort in Russia, Mongolia and the FSU. Industrial minerals exploration, previously a separate team, has been integrated into the regional teams and project generation.

At the end of 2006, Rio Tinto was exploring in over 35 countries for a broad range of commodities including copper, diamonds, nickel, industrial minerals, bauxite, uranium, iron ore and coal.

Exploration employs about 180 geoscientists around the world and has a total complement of approximately 900 people.