The 2023 Offshore Greenhouse Gas Storage Acreage Release is a key strategy of the Australian Government to reduce emissions and support Australia's resource sector. The GHG acreage release will provide companies the opportunity to explore for offshore carbon dioxide injection and storage locations. The 2023 GHG acreage release consists of 10 areas across the Bonaparte, Browse, Northern Carnarvon Basins, Perth, Otway, Bass and Gippsland Basins.

This package contains presentations given during NT Resources week, at the Uncovering East Tennant workshop held in Darwin on September 3, 2019, and Mining the Territory, September 5, 2019. The presentation given by Andrew Heap at the Mining the Territory forum is a high level overview of the data collection and activities of GA and it's collaborative partners across Northern Australia in conjunction with the Exploring for the Future (EFTF) program. The workshop, held in collaboration with the Northern Territory Geological Survey, outlined new mineral exploration opportunities in the East Tennant area, which lies beneath the Barkly Tableland and extends approximately 250 km east of Tennant Creek. The East Tennant area has been the focus of geochemical, geological and geophysical data acquisition as part of Geoscience Australia's Exploring for the Future program. This free event showcased new science insights for the East Tennant area and how this under-explored region has opportunities for greenfield mineral discoveries.

The 2021 Offshore Greenhouse Gas Storage Acreage Release is a key strategy of the Australian Government to reduce emissions and support Australia's resource sector. The GHG acreage release will provide companies the opportunity to explore for offshore carbon dioxide injection and storage locations. The 2021 GHG acreage release consists of 5 areas across the Bonaparte, Browse and Northern Carnarvon Basins.

Understanding the character of Australia's extensive regolith cover is crucial to the continuing success of mineral exploration. We hypothesize that the regolith contains geochemical fingerprints of processes related to the development and preservation of mineral systems at a range of scales. We test this hypothesis by analysing the composition of surface sediments within greenfield regional (southern Thomson Orogen) and continental (Australia) study areas. In the southern Thomson Orogen area, the first principal component (PC1) derived in our study (Ca, Sr, Cu, Mg, Au, and Mo at one end; rare earth elements (REEs) and Th at the other) is very similar to the empirical vector successfully used by a local company exploring for Cu-Au mineralisation (enrichment in Sr, Ca and Au concomitant with depletion in REEs). Mapping the spatial distribution of PC1 in the region reveals several areas of elevated values and possible mineralisation potential. One of the strongest targets in the PC1 map is located between Brewarrina and Bourke in northern New South Wales. Here both historical and recent exploration drilling has intersected mineralisation with up to 1 % Cu, 0.1 g/t Au, and 717 ppm Zn, purportedly related to a volcanic arc setting. The analysis of a comparable geochemical dataset at the continental scale yields a similar PC1 (Ca, Sr, Mg, Cu, Au, and Mo at one end; REEs and Th at the other) to the regional study. Mapping PC1 at the continental scale shows patterns that (1) are compatible with the regional study, and (2) reveal several geological regions possibly with an enhanced potential for this style of Cu-Au mineralisation. These include well-endowed mineral provinces such as the Curnamona, southern Pilbara, and Capricorn regions, but also some greenfield regions such as the Albany-Fraser/western Eucla, western Murray, and Eromanga geological regions. We conclude that the geochemical composition of Australia's regolith may hold critical information pertaining to mineralisation within/beneath it.

The 2021 Offshore Greenhouse Gas Storage Acreage Release is a key strategy of the Australian Government to reduce emissions and support Australia's resource sector. The GHG acreage release will provide companies the opportunity to explore for offshore carbon dioxide injection and storage locations. The 2021 GHG acreage release consists of 5 areas across the Bonaparte, Browse and Northern Carnarvon Basins.

The annual offshore petroleum exploration acreage release is part of the government’s strategy to promote offshore oil and gas exploration. Each year, the government invites companies to bid for the opportunity to invest in oil and gas exploration in Australian waters. The 2020 acreage release consists of 42 areas offshore of the Northern Territory, Western Australia, Victoria and the Ashmore and Cartier Islands.

The annual offshore petroleum exploration acreage release is part of the government’s strategy to promote offshore oil and gas exploration. Each year, the government invites companies to bid for the opportunity to invest in oil and gas exploration in Australian waters. The 2020 acreage release consists of 42 areas offshore of the Northern Territory, Western Australia, Victoria and the Ashmore and Cartier Islands.

The Roebuck Basin on Australia’s offshore north-western margin is the focus of a regional hydrocarbon prospectivity assessment being undertaken by the Offshore Energy Studies section. This offshore program is designed to produce pre-competitive information to assist with the evaluation of the hydrocarbon resource potential of the central North West Shelf and facilitate exploration investment in Australia. The recent oil and gas discoveries at Phoenix South 1 (2014), Roc 1 (2015-16), Roc 2 (2016), Phoenix South 2 (2016), Phoenix South 3 (2018), Dorado 1 (2018), Dorado 2 (2019) and Dorado 3 (2019) wells in the Bedout Sub-basin demonstrate the presence of a petroleum system in Lower Triassic strata (Thompson, 2020; Thompson et al., 2015 and 2018). The current study aims to better understand this new petroleum system and establish its extent. As part of this program, a range of organic geochemical analyses were acquired on petroleum fluids from the Roc 1 and Roc 2 wells with these data released in this report.

The National Geochemical Survey of Australia (<a href="http://www.ga.gov.au/ngsa" title="NGSA website" target="_blank">NGSA</a>) is Australia’s only internally consistent, continental-scale <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.11636/Record.2011.020" title="NGSA geochemical atlas and dataset" target="_blank">geochemical atlas and dataset</a>. The present dataset contains additional mineralogical data obtained on NGSA samples selected from the Darling-Curnamona-Delamerian (<a href="https://www.ga.gov.au/eftf/projects/darling-curnamona-delamerian" title="DCD website" target="_blank">DCD</a>) region of southeastern Australia for the first partial data release of the Heavy Mineral Map of Australia (HMMA) project. The HMMA, a collaborative project between Geoscience Australia and Curtin University underpinned by a pilot project establishing its feasibility, is part of the Australian Government-funded Exploring for the Future (<a href="https://www.ga.gov.au/eftf" title="EFTF website" target="_blank">EFTF</a>) program. The selected 223 NGSA sediment samples fall within the DCD polygon plus an approximately one-degree buffer. The samples were taken on average from 60 to 80 cm depth in floodplain landforms, dried and sieved to a 75-430 µm grainsize fraction, and the contained heavy minerals (HMs; i.e., those with a specific gravity >2.9 g/cm³) were separated by dense fluids and mounted on cylindrical epoxy mounts. After polishing and carbon-coating, the mounts were subjected to automated mineralogical analysis on a TESCAN® Integrated Mineral Analyzer (TIMA). Using scanning electron microscopy and backscatter electron imaging integrated with energy dispersive X-ray analysis, the TIMA identified over 140 different HMs in the DCD area. The dataset, consisting of over 29 million individual mineral grains identified, was quality controlled and validated by an expert team. The data released here can be visualised, explored and downloaded using an online, bespoke mineral network analysis tool (<a href="https://geoscienceaustralia.shinyapps.io/mna4hm/" title="MNA website" target="_blank">MNA</a>) built on a cloud-based platform. Accompanying this report are a data file of TIMA results and a mineralogy vocabulary file. When completed in 2023, it is hoped the HMMA project will positively impact mineral exploration and prospectivity modelling around Australia, as well as have other applications in earth and environmental sciences.

A regional hydrocarbon prospectivity study was undertaken in the onshore Canning Basin in Western Australia as part of the Exploring for the Future (EFTF) program, an Australian Government initiative dedicated to driving investment in resource exploration. As part of this program, significant work has been carried out to deliver new pre-competitive data including new seismic acquisition, drilling of a stratigraphic well, and the geochemical analysis of geological samples recovered from exploration wells. A regional, 872 km long 2D seismic line (18GA-KB1) acquired in 2018 by Geoscience Australia (GA) and the Geological Survey of Western Australia (GSWA), images the Kidson Sub-basin of the Canning Basin. In order to provide a test of geological interpretations made from the Kidson seismic survey, a deep stratigraphic well, Barnicarndy 1, was drilled in 2019 in a partnership between Geoscience Australia (GA) and the Geological Survey of Western Australia (GSWA) in the Barnicarndy Graben, 67 km west of Telfer, in the southwest Canning Basin. Drilling recovered about 2100 m of continuous core from 580 mRT to the driller’s total depth (TD) of 2680.53 mRT. An extensive analytical program was carried out to characterise the lithology, age and depositional environment of these sediments. This data release presents organic geochemical analyses undertaken on rock extracts obtained from cores selected from the Barnicarndy 1 well. The molecular and stable isotope data carbon and hydrogen will be used to understand the type of organic matter being preserved, the depositional facies and thermal maturity of the Lower Ordovician sedimentary rocks penetrated in this well. This information provides complementary information to other datasets including organic petrological and palynological studies.