BHP Billiton is staying away from any large scale exploration in key mineral segments such as iron ore, coal and potash, as its deals with a sharply lower capital expenditure budget.
The resources giant will instead shift focus to conventional oil and copper, allocating nearly all of its $US900 million exploration budget for 2016/17 on the two commodities where its sees maximum long term growth potential.
"At this point, there is no push for us to replace iron ore reserves for multiple decades," BHP's geoscience head Laura Tyler said on Tuesday.
"We are only doing some confirmatory drilling. Even for metallurgical coal, we have one of the best positions in the world, so we don't need to look for more reserves."
Iron ore and coal account for about half of BHP's revenue.
BHP cut its capital expenditure budget to $US5 billion for the 2017 fiscal year from $US7 billion in 2015/16, as it moved to preserve cash amid a prolonged downturn in commodities markets.
The company - along with rivals Rio and Vale - continued to pump iron ore into an oversupplied market despite falling prices during the past two years, but was forced to change strategy after posting a $US5.7 billion half-year loss in February.
It has boosted its 2016/17 exploration budget by nearly 30 per cent, but will spend the bulk of the cash on conventional oil exploration in the deepwater basins of the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean and off the coast of Western Australia.
Crude oil prices have rebounded nearly 70 per cent this year from multi-year lows below $US30 a barrel in January, when BHP wrote down the value of its US shale assets.
About a quarter of its exploration budget will be spent on targeting greenfield copper deposits in Chile, Peru, the US, Canada and South Australia, the company said.
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