Australia's Identified Mineral Resources is an annual national assessment that takes a long-term view of Australian mineral resources likely to be available for mining. The assessment also includes evaluations of long-term trends in mineral resources, world rankings, summaries of significant exploration results and brief reviews of mining industry developments.

Australia's Identified Mineral Resources is an annual national assessment that takes a long-term view of Australian mineral resources likely to be available for mining. The assessment also includes evaluations of long-term trends in mineral resources, world rankings, summaries of significant exploration results and brief reviews of mining industry developments.

<div>The resources industry is a key driver of Australia’s economic prosperity. The resources industry – which includes mining, oil and gas and exploration and mining services – accounted for 18 per cent of Australia’s gross domestic product (GDP) and employed 200,000 people in 2021–22 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2023a). This success is driven by a significant resource endowment, a skilled labour force, substantial capital investment, and the availability of world class precompetitive geoscience data and analysis that supports the resources industry in discovering and extracting resources. &nbsp;</div><div>Precompetitive geoscience data and analysis refers to geological, geophysical, geochemical, and other types of data collected by government agencies. This data is made freely available to all as a public good and provides a foundational understanding of a region’s resource potential before exploration and extraction activities take place. &nbsp;</div><div>Precompetitive geoscience data and analysis plays an important role in supporting resource exploration. Industry surveys conducted by GA suggest that precompetitive geoscience data and analysis is used by over 80 per cent of companies operating in the non-ferrous metals extraction industry and oil and gas extraction industry. The data and analysis help companies to identify highly prospective areas, thereby reducing costs and risks to industry. This stimulates exploration tenement uptake and exploration activity in the most prospective regions, which is required for the discovery and extraction of resources from greenfield sites and expanded brownfield sites. &nbsp;</div><div>Mineral exploration would be significantly more expensive and carry a higher risk in the absence of precompetitive geoscience data and analysis. This would likely decrease the amount of exploration occurring in Australia, as the expected return on exploration would be lower than could be gained elsewhere. A decline in exploration would lead to a subsequent decline in the rate of resource discovery. Over the long-term, this would lead to a reduction in resource extraction at greenfield sites (and to a lesser extent, at brownfield sites) in Australia. Through this relationship, the initial provision of precompetitive data underpins a significant amount of value within the Australian economy, which is easily overlooked. &nbsp;</div><div>It is in this context that Deloitte Access&nbsp;Economics was engaged by GA to estimate the economic contribution of precompetitive geoscience data and analysis in 2021–22. GA is the national public sector geoscience organisation and is primarily responsible for generating and curating Australia’s precompetitive geoscience data and analysis, along with state and territory geological surveys and various research initiatives. &nbsp;</div><div>Precompetitive geoscience data&nbsp;and analysis&nbsp;production: The analysis reveals that Australia’s precompetitive geoscience data and analysis producers had a direct economic contribution of $71 million in value added and supported 432 FTE jobs in 2021–22. &nbsp;</div><div>This value added is derived from wages and salaries paid to employees in the data production process, representing close to half of the total expenditure on data production ($151 million). GA is the largest producer of precompetitive geoscience data and analysis in Australia and therefore had the highest value added among data producers. This is driven in large part through activities conducted as part of GA’s Exploring for the Future program. &nbsp;</div><div>Precompetitive geoscience data&nbsp;and analysis use: Survey data by GA indicates that precompetitive geoscience data and analysis is used widely for resource exploration and extraction,&nbsp;particularly for the discovery of nonferrous metal ores and oil and gas.&nbsp;</div><div>&nbsp;Precompetitive geoscience data and analysis allows resource companies to make more targeted&nbsp;investment decisions and deploy their labour more efficiently, resulting in cost&nbsp;savings. &nbsp;</div><div>The direct economic contribution of precompetitive geoscience data and analysis use in 2021–22 consists of: &nbsp;</div><div>• $5.5 billion direct value added and 24,361 FTE jobs supported by the use of precompetitive geoscience data and analysis in exploration and mining support services &nbsp;</div><div>• $24.0 billion direct value added and 34,244 FTE jobs supported by the use of precompetitive geoscience data and analysis for non-ferrous metal ore&nbsp;extraction &nbsp;</div><div>• $46.5 billion direct value added and 21,305 FTE jobs supported by the use of precompetitive geoscience data and analysis for oil and gas extraction &nbsp;</div><div>These estimates are considered conservative. </div><div><br></div><div><br></div>

Australia's Identified Mineral Resources is an annual national assessment that takes a long-term view of Australian mineral resources likely to be available for mining. The assessment also includes evaluations of long-term trends in mineral resources, world rankings, summaries of significant exploration results and brief reviews of mining industry developments.

Mineral exploration ideally involves researching geological potential within the constraints of economic feasibility. Nevertheless, explicit consideration of economic factors is often delayed until late in the exploration cycle. This is not ideal. Like mineral prospectivity, projected economic feasibility can be used to refine the search space and thereby reduce the risks associated with mineral exploration undercover. Here, we outline an exploration strategy based on the notion of identifying economic fairways—that is, regions permissive to resource development from an economic perspective. The approach appraises the economics of Au, Cu, Ni, Pb, Zn, potash and phosphate deposits by modelling revenue against capital expenditure (such as the costs of employment, mining overburden and access to infrastructure). We demonstrate the economic fairways approach through regional assessment of a Tennant Creek–style iron oxide–copper–gold deposit across northern Australia. Our results indicate that such a mineral deposit is expected to be economically viable across much of northern Australia, including in areas with several hundreds of metres of overburden. Our analysis sheds light on the need for accurate cover thickness models, without which undercover economic fairways cannot be defined. Our online tool benefits mineral explorers, and also helps to inform investors about the relative strengths of potential mineral projects; policy makers could use it to plan regional infrastructure development in frontier mineral provinces. <b>Citation:</b> Haynes, M.W., Walsh, S.D.C., Czarnota, K., Northey, S.A. and Yellishetty, M., 2020. Economic fairways assessments across northern Australia. In: Czarnota, K., Roach, I., Abbott, S., Haynes, M., Kositcin, N., Ray, A. and Slatter, E. (eds.) Exploring for the Future: Extended Abstracts, Geoscience Australia, Canberra, 1–4.

<div><strong>Output type: </strong>Exploring for the Future Extended Abstract <strong> </strong></div><div><br></div><div><strong>Short abstract: </strong>There is an increased international focus on achieving high environmental, socio-economic, and governance (ESG) outcomes within mineral supply chains, in addition to delivering positive economic results. Mineral exploration and development projects must balance these disparate objectives to the satisfaction of separate stakeholders. However, the challenge of reconciling distinct preferences can obscure viable outcomes and confound project selection, particularly in the early stages of project development. Here, we discuss how such investment decisions can be treated as multicriteria optimization problems. In appraising the pre-competitive potential for nickel sulphide developments, we show how this approach can be used to effectively evaluate competing objectives and to locate regions that perform best under a range of different metrics. We outline a mapping framework that identifies Australian regions that optimally balance geological potential, economic value, and environmental impact. Our workflow creates a new capability within Australia to incorporate high-level, holistic information into the earliest stages of exploration. While this abstract focuses on mineral exploration, the modelling could be extended to other Australian resource development applications. Importantly, our results further underscore the need to compile baseline ESG datasets across Australia to help drive sustainable exploration decisions.</div><div><br></div><div><strong>Citation:</strong> Walsh S.D.C., Haynes M.W. &amp; Wang C., 2024. Multicriteria resource potential mapping: balancing geological, economic &amp; environmental factors. In: Czarnota, K. (ed.) Exploring for the Future: Extended Abstracts. Geoscience Australia, Canberra. https://doi.org/10.26186/149250</div>

<div>Hydrogen-based iron and steel production could reduce global carbon emissions. However, the opportunities and challenges presented by this technology are obscured as its cost competitiveness depends on multiple industrial processes, each with various feedstock requirements, storage options, and supporting infrastructure. To address this problem, we have developed the Green Steel Economic Fairways Mapper. This free, online tool models the costs of hydrogen-based green ironmaking and steelmaking, and maps cost variations across Australia. The Mapper combines large-scale infrastructure and geoscience datasets to provide a high-level, geospatial analysis of the economic viability of hypothetical green steel projects. It creates a new capability within Australia—filling the void before the detail and expense of feasibility studies—to understand the broad contours of the decarbonization challenge, and to inform early-stage decision making in the pursuit of low-carbon steel.</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>The Mapper optimizes system capacities for renewable energy generation, battery storage, hydrogen electrolysis, and hydrogen storage to estimate the levelized costs of green iron or green steel. Our modelled costs, under our preferred 2025 technology cost assumptions, are shown in Figure 1. Regions in southern and central Western Australia have the lowest cost estimates, with similar potential modelled for South Australia, western Victoria, and northern Queensland. The key drivers vary across regions. For instance, central Australia has complimentary renewable energy characteristics but is limited by transportation costs. As a tool, the Mapper also allows users to refine their own key assumptions, or to quickly model different scenarios. In this manner the Mapper creates an open capability for Australian industry, government, and the public to assess domestic green steel production potential. Presented at the 2024 Australian Hydrogen Research Conference (AHRC)

Ore Reserves at operating mines, geographical distribution of Economic Demonstrated Resources and commodity map data as at December 2022.

Australia's Identified Mineral Resources is an annual national assessment that takes a long-term view of Australian mineral resources likely to be available for mining. The assessment also includes evaluations of long-term trends in mineral resources, world rankings, summaries of significant exploration results and brief reviews of mining industry developments.

Australia's Identified Mineral Resources is an annual national assessment that takes a long-term view of Australian mineral resources likely to be available for mining. The assessment also includes evaluations of long-term trends in mineral resources, world rankings, summaries of significant exploration results and brief reviews of mining industry developments.