Lima, March 22, 2024. During the recent Jueves Minero (Mining Thursday), where the 14th International Congress of Prospectors and Explorers - proEXPLO 2025 was presented, Walter Tejada, president of the event, pointed out that despite the complicated international context for financing mining exploration, there is a growing interest in exploring critical metals such as copper, lithium, nickel and others.

While Tejada acknowledged that the 2023 global exploration budget was reduced by -3% compared to 2022, there is a need to secure the supply of such metals to drive the energy transition and global warming mitigation, so investment for this will grow or at least be maintained.

"Latin America continues to lead the regions with the largest exploration budget received, with 3.4% of the global total. In 2023, the region grew 2% to a total of US$3.38 billion. In the case of Peru, last year investment in exploration totaled US$ 433 million, which represented an increase of 2.4% over the previous year and, according to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, the highest figure in 5 years", he explained.

As is well known, Peru has great geological potential and is one of the world's main producers of copper, an essential mineral for the decarbonization of the energy matrix.

In this sense, the also Americas Operations Manager at BHP Exploration, considered that Peru and Latin America "have the potential to grow if we know how to take advantage of the opportunities and create favorable conditions to bring more investment".

Underexplored geological potential

During his presentation, Tejada also indicated that only 1.5% of Peru's territory is used for mining production or exploration activities and, in spite of this, the country ranks among the world's top producers of various metals.

"There is an enormous potential to take advantage of and value the resources that Peru has. We need to do this by facilitating exploration with clear, simple and predictable rules," he said.

And with this, he added that "we believe that the portfolio of mining exploration projects, which currently consists of 70 projects, could easily grow in the next 5 years to 50% or even double if there were favorable conditions for investment".