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Exploration & Projects

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Exploration & Projects

Barrick Gold has a demonstrated track record of creating value through exploration and project development across our extensive land positions in many of the world’s most prolific mineral districts.

Exploration
Growth Projects
Greenfield Projects

Exploration

Successful exploration is the lifeline for any mining company, being to mining what research and development is to the pharmaceutical industry.

Both Barrick Gold and Randgold were built on pioneering exploration success as well as significant reserve additions that followed key acquisitions.

Barrick Gold’s strategy is to:

Consolidate and secure dominant land positions in its favoured operating districts and emerging new prospective geological domains.

Focus on economically feasible discoveries with potential Tier One status.

Collaborate closely with mineral resource management to optimize existing orebodies and mining operations.

Establish and develop motivated and highly agile discovery driven teams.

Optimize the value of undeveloped projects.

Identify emerging opportunities and secure them through earn-in or acquisition.

Barrick Gold Project Development

Barrick Gold retains extensive expertise in the management of all aspects of greenfield and brownfield mine development, including scoping and management of feasibility and engineering studies, process development and piloting, procurement, construction, and commissioning of new mines and processing plants. Once the mine is commissioned, our world-class operations teams work to ensure that the maximum value of the resource is realized for all our stakeholders. Whether working on a wholly-owned property, or providing development and operations expertise and services to one of our joint-venture partners, we remain focused on delivering sustainable returns for our owners and partners.

2021 Regional Exploration Triangle

Our exploration portfolio is managed through the resource triangle. Projects must pass a set of filters to advance, otherwise they are eliminated. Barrick Gold aims to ensure we are continually replenishing the resource triangle at all stages and keeping it balanced. The company is already in many of the world’s most prospective gold districts, but we continue to look for emerging new gold districts wherever they may be.

2021 Resource Triangle

Improving geology models

A focus in the first half of 2019 was on improving Barrick Gold’s mine geological databases, borehole logging as well as geological and grade control models. This has laid the foundations for improved geology models which are critical for more reliable resource models to help optimize mine planning. We are now well placed to resume investing in our future through focused greenfields exploration, driven by the clear understanding that it is exploration that ultimately drives the company’s value chain.

Barrick Gold has active reconnaissance teams scouting for new Tier One opportunities in Canada, the Guiana Shield, and more recently in Japan and Tanzania. (We consider a Tier One gold asset to be a mine with a stated life in excess of 10 years, annual production of at least 500,000 ounces of gold and total cash costs per ounce over the mine life that are in the lower half of the industry cost curve.) Our teams conduct close surveillance of competitor activity to identify emerging new discoveries and projects where the full potential to yield a discovery has not yet been realized.

Mineral resource management model

The relationship and integration with the company’s unique mineral resource management (MRM) model as a core part of our operating culture introduces responsible and sustainable stewardship of valuable orebodies to optimize and deliver that value. Every site has an exploration and MRM lead who work together to ensure we update and improve our geological models and look to immediate opportunities to identify brownfields potential for resource and, ultimately, reserve additions.

Read more in our 2020 Annual Report

Growth Projects

We have one of the deepest project pipelines in the gold industry, including brownfield projects near existing operations, greenfield exploration discoveries and some of the largest undeveloped gold deposits in the world, providing significant optionality and leverage to gold prices.

Greenfield Projects

Footnote

  1. Estimated in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 as required by Canadian securities regulatory authorities. Estimates are as of December 31, 2019, and presented on a attributable basis, unless otherwise noted. Complete mineral reserve and resource data, including tonnes, grades, and ounces, as well as the assumptions on which the mineral reserves for Barrick are reported (on an attributable basis), are set out on pages 36-44 of Barrick’s Annual Information Form for the year ended December 31, 2019 available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and on EDGAR at www.sec.gov.