Data from the soon-to-be-released Corporate Exploration Strategies study showed that the estimated total budget worldwide nonferrous metals exploration dropped to $US11.36 billion ($A13 billion) from $15.2 billion last year.

“Higher operating and capital costs, lower ore grades, uncertain demand for commodities and investor discontent have required major companies to focus on a return to healthy margins after years of growth-oriented spending,” SNL said.

“To that end, the majors have been divesting noncore assets and cutting back on capital project and exploration spending, which has led to an unsurprising 25% drop in the majors' exploration budget total in 2014.”

Exploration budgets of junior miners fell 29% this year after falling 39% last year.

Juniors’ share of the overall budget dropped to 32% from a high of 55% in 2007.

The data covers exploration for precious and base metals, diamonds, uranium and some industrial minerals, but excludes iron ore, aluminium, coal and oil and gas.

Exploration allocations for all targets except platinum group metals decreased in 2014.

Gold exploration attracted the biggest spend, or 43% of the total, though budgets declined for the second consecutive year, falling another 31% to $4.57 billion, the lowest share of worldwide spend since 2009.

While it’s been another tough year for the gold price, many base metals have increased at certain stages of this year, leading to a 2% increase in the share of base metal exploration spend to the highest level since 2008.

Despite that, budgets for base metals still declined by $1 billion.

Canada and Australia remained the top two countries for global spend, followed by the US, Mexico and Chile.

For the first time, budgets for brownfields exploration surpassed grassroots, which hit a record low.

The information was collected from almost 3500 mining and exploration companies globally, of which nearly 2000 had exploration budgets of at least $100,000.