As well, loans cost the company money. They negatively impact the balance sheet. They need to be serviced for the life of the exploreco, basically.

A junior exploreco has (by definition) nearly no assets and negative income, and is 99% likely to fail at defining a resource at any one particular property. Even worse, they are at the whim of the commodity market: it is a given that the price of their metal (if they even have any) will vary extremely over the next 10 years. So lending to an exploreco is a lot worse than lending to a small business. I don't even know how a bank could calculate the risk for the purpose of setting a profitable interest rate.

You can certainly get a loan when you have defined a resource, done your scoping study, have a mine plan and are heading into production. At that point, when you need to raise $300M for your mine and mill, you can raise some money through dilution, and the rest through debt. You can even go to forward sales of your production. Silver Wheaton and Sandstorm partner with startup mines this way and make good money at it.

But the point is, if your company is at that stage, you have a Net Present Value for your future mine, and so a bank can calculate your liquidation value, and so the risk can be calculated, and so you can get an interest rate out of all that.

GNH could perhaps raise money at the pre-43-101 junior exploreco stage by selling a partial interest in their property, e.g. to Barrick or Goldcorp. But that is very dangerous: basically you're giving the major the first chance at refusing any buyout offer. In return, you're only receiving pennies on the dollar for your property, since you haven't proven there's a mineable resource there yet.

Basically, juniors always fall back on raising capital through dilution. That's because dilution hurts nobody but the shareholders.