Mapping the Amazon's Gold Future: SGB's New Frontier

The Brazilian Geological Survey has spent 2024 and 2025 publishing the

maps that will define the country's next generation of gold and copper

exploration. From the new favourability charts for the

Carajás-Tapajós-Alta Floresta axis to a 54,000-square-kilometre project

in southeast Amazonas, the upstream picture for Brazilian gold is being

rewritten in public view.¹

The SGB's Growing Role

The Serviço Geológico do Brasil, historically known by its CPRM acronym,

is the federal agency responsible for geological mapping and mineral

resource assessment. Its product is rarely dramatic on a quarterly

basis, but its long-term influence is enormous: the maps the agency

publishes determine where exploration capital can be deployed with

confidence.

In 2024 SGB launched its Plano Decenal de Mapeamento Geológico (PlanGeo)

covering the 2025-2034 period, alongside a series of targeted studies

focused on the energy-transition minerals agenda. The retrospective

published in early 2025 described the year as marked by advances in

geological mapping, the strengthening of international partnerships and

strategic studies focused on energy transition.¹

Those international partnerships carry specific weight in the context of

2025 geopolitics. The United States, the European Union and Japan have

all been courting Brazilian critical-minerals and gold upstream

projects, and the SGB has become one of the primary technical

interlocutors for that engagement. An authoritative federal geological

dataset is a prerequisite for the kind of structured capital commitments

— DFC loans, CRMA strategic-project designations, export-credit

facilities — that have begun to flow.

The New Favourability Map

The single most important publication for the gold sector was the SGB's

new favourability map for copper and gold deposits in the Amazon. The

map extends from the western edge of the Carajás Mineral Province,

through the Tapajós Mineral Province, to the Alta Floresta Mineral

Province in the states of Pará and Mato Grosso.¹

What makes this publication unusual is its explicit investor

orientation. Favourability maps are a technical exercise, but the SGB's

decision to emphasise them in its 2024 retrospective, and to frame them

alongside the PlanGeo priorities, signals that the agency wants the maps

used — not shelved. Exploration companies have historically complained

that Brazilian upstream geological data is fragmented; the Amazon

favourability product narrows that complaint significantly.

The geological rationale aligns with what Brazil's current gold majors

already know. Vale's Sossego and Salobo operations — both primarily

copper mines that deliver significant gold as a by-product — sit inside

the Carajás province. The Tapajós has a long artisanal-mining history,

and the Alta Floresta belt has produced intermittently for decades. The

new map formalises the idea that a single mineralised corridor runs

through all three, and that porphyry-hosted copper-gold systems along it

remain under-explored.

Sucunduri: 54,000 km² Under the Microscope

The agency's flagship field project of the current cycle is Geologia e

Potencial Mineral do Sudeste do Amazonas: Região do Rio Sucunduri.

Initiated in 2022, the project covers roughly 54,000 square kilometres

of the Sucunduri river region in southeast Amazonas state.¹

The investigation includes the geological controls for occurrences of

gold, copper, phosphate and amethyst, which means the results will be

relevant to multiple upstream audiences at once. For gold specifically,

the Sucunduri area sits along a southern extension of the belts that

have historically produced in Alta Floresta and southern Pará — a trend

that has been lightly explored by modern standards.

At 54,000 square kilometres the project is larger than many European

countries. Even partial coverage will generate the kind of

regional-scale geochemistry, geophysics and structural framework data

that exploration companies use to justify subsequent detailed work. The

SGB has not disclosed specific targets or anomalies, but the scale of

the programme is the signal.

PlanGeo 2025-2034 and What It Targets

PlanGeo is the ten-year blueprint that the SGB will execute alongside

project-specific work. Priority blocks for geological mapping in the

2025-2034 cycle are distributed across three macro-regions — Amazon,

Northeast and Center-South — with selection criteria that explicitly

include potential for strategic and critical minerals for energy

transition (lithium, copper, rare earth elements, graphite) and mineral

inputs for agribusiness (phosphate).¹

The gold dimension is embedded rather than headlined. Copper-gold

porphyry systems will be mapped as a side-effect of the

critical-minerals agenda, and several of the priority blocks in the

Amazon region lie in the same trend as existing gold operations. For

investors, that overlap is a feature: the same federal geological

investment that underpins a critical-minerals strategic partnership with

the European Union or the United States will also generate the data that

shapes the next decade of Brazilian gold exploration.

Implications for Investors

Three implications stand out. First, the Amazon favourability map

legitimises exploration along the Carajás-Tapajós-Alta Floresta trend in

the eyes of capital allocators who have previously been wary of

regulatory and logistical complexity. The combination of explicit

federal geological endorsement and rising gold prices reduces the hurdle

rate for private upstream capital.

Second, Brazilian majors with existing Amazon footprints — notably Vale

in Carajás and the handful of listed mid-tier names with projects in

Pará and Mato Grosso — stand to benefit from SGB data that frames their

near-mine exploration targets. The same is true for international

exploration companies that hold permits in the region but have struggled

to raise risk capital; better federal data lowers the perceived