Abstract:
Coal exploration expenditures continued to rise during 2006~2012 year by year, and began to reduce rapidly since 2013, exploration expenditure in 2015 is less than a third of that level in 2012.This paper analyzes the factors of coal exploration expenditures in China in the past 10 years in order to forecast the prospect of coal exploration.On the basis of introduction about super profits in Adam Smith’s “Wealth of the Nations”, excess return is introduced in order to measure the attractiveness of mineral exploration industry to social capital.The relationship between coal prices, excess return of coal industry, structure of expenditures, mining rights policy and coal exploration expenditures are analyzed.The analysis shows that the peak of coal prices appeared 4 years earlier than the peak of coal exploration expenditures in China; the excess return of the coal industry directly affects the coal exploration expenditure; the structure of coal exploration expenditures and the mining right access policy are also important factors for coal exploration expenditures.