Resourcing Australia's Prosperity About the initiative
What will Resourcing Australia’s Prosperity achieve?
Geoscience Australia, in partnership with Commonwealth and state and territory governments, will comprehensively map Australia’s onshore resource potential for all 36 critical minerals and strategic materials, as well as Australia’s groundwater systems. It will also assess options for geological storage of hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
Offshore, it will assess suitable sites for renewable energy infrastructure and carbon dioxide storage.
Through this generational investment, Geoscience Australia will:
- Assess national resource potential, mapping ‘hot spots’ for all of Australia’s critical minerals and strategic materials, and other resources needed to support the net zero transition.
- Map all of Australia’s groundwater systems, supporting our climate resilience, our agricultural output and water security for communities, industries and the environment.
- Investigate 12 onshore deep dive regions with unrealised potential for the resources needed to support Australia’s transition to net zero.
- Complete Australia-wide geoscience datasets, the building blocks used to see and understand what lies below the land surface and seabed.
Four core components of the Resourcing Australia’s Prosperity initiative
Benefits
Precompetitive geoscience data, analysis and decision support tools inform decision-making by government, industry and communities.
- For explorers and resource developers, it will narrow the search area and lower the technical risks of resource exploration, particularly in unexplored and underexplored regions.
- For investors, it will provide information on resource opportunities, increasing Australia’s attractiveness as an investment destination.
- For governments, including environmental regulators and local decision-makers, it will inform resource and land management decisions.
- For First Nations peoples and regional Australians, it will provide information and certainty about their lands, enabling sustainable and responsible resource exploration and development that creates jobs and supports local economic growth.
An improved knowledge of Australia’s resource potential will provide a pipeline of new discoveries and sustainable development, generating new jobs and investment opportunities under the Australian Government’s Future Made in Australia policy.
Map showing mineral potential of Australia for ultramafic-mafic intrusion-related nickel, copper and platinum group elements