A Brisbane-based company exploring in Alaska and Nevada says good ground is hard to get in Australia.

The company was focusing on North America for its high prospectivity, PolarX managing director Jason Berton said. But that’s not all.

“It’s hard to get projects in Australia. It’s very competitive. The US don’t really do anywhere near as much exploration as the Canadians and the Australians do,” Dr Berton said. 

Main image: PolarX prospects in north America

“I started looking closer at the US and thought, they shut down a lot of their gold mines for the war effort in World War II and most of them didn’t reopen. And there’s a lot of ground there that no one’s touched for 60, 70, 80 years. 

“And so they’ve got more, they’ve progressed from primary industries more than we have. They have heavily saturated tertiary industry market and so many opportunities there that a lot of the youth doesn’t focus on the primary stuff that you get out of mining. 

“So guys like us from Australia and the Canadians, we find opportunities in the US. It’s about identifying those opportunities in a safe jurisdiction.”

Cloncurry Shire is one of the most prospective regions in the country where the vast majority of land is tied up under some mining or exploration lease.

Other companies have vast swathes of country pegged for exploration. Anglo American has a million square kilometres and Rio Tinto has more than 770,000 square kilometres in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

It was common for a lot of prospective land to be held by a small number of owners, Dr Berton said. 

“Chile wasn’t different, there was Codelco, BHP and Rio Tinto. Basically Codelco had a third of the ground tied up and it’s only the current government that’s trying to make them ‘use it or lose it’ sort of thing. 

“Whereas you don’t have any of that in the US, so you can find ground and find projects and good projects. The quality of the projects there is much better than what we’ve got here. 

“That’s my view. From a junior point of view … there’re some great discoveries being made and they’ll continue to be made. But we’ve got a lot of cover rock here too, so often it’s beneath thick cover and it’s much more difficult to really explore some of that stuff.”

The company was looking to have further red tape burden lifted in the upcoming period of the Trump presidency, Dr Berton said.