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National scale critical and strategic mineral potential assessments to support decision making in the net zero transition

Created 19/11/2025

Updated 19/11/2025

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With the projected increase in demand for critical minerals and strategic materials required to meet net zero objectives by 2050, a series of national-scale mineral potential assessments are being delivered as part of the Resourcing Australia’s Prosperity initiative at Geoscience Australia. In addition to providing an evidence-base for supporting government decision-making, these precompetitive assessments aim to support the discovery of deposits that host critical minerals and strategic materials by reducing the exploration search space and promoting increased exploration investment. The mineral potential assessments integrate both new and legacy geoscience data and aim to delineate prospective belts or districts where favourable geological, geophysical, and geochemical criteria that represent evidence of relevant mineral systems processes are present. To date, assessments for nickel-copper-platinum group element, sediment-hosted base metal, carbonatite-related rare earth element, and iron oxide-copper-gold mineral systems have been undertaken at a national-scale by Geoscience Australia as part of previous programs, with additional mineral systems currently being assessed. The methodology used in each assessment is reviewed on a case-by-case basis due to the widely varying availability of known deposits and occurrences that can be used to train data-driven models using statistics or machine learning for each mineral system. Using a mineral systems-based approach as a basis, the Resourcing Australia’s Prosperity initiative aims to deliver a series of commodity potential maps for all of Australia’s critical minerals and strategic materials. An example of how this may be achieved for copper will be presented, with an interim map highlighting Australia’s copper potential based on the mineral systems modelled to date. Presented at the 2025 Society of Economic Geologists (SEG) Conference

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Additional Info

Field Value
Title National scale critical and strategic mineral potential assessments to support decision making in the net zero transition
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/bf9e67f9-c2e8-4b92-be3e-099e5340b45a
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period 11/11/2025
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
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Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "National scale critical and strategic mineral potential assessments to support decision making in the net zero transition". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/national-scale-critical-and-strategic-mineral-potential-assessments-to-support-decision-making-