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Australia’s mineral resources are an important component of the nation’s wealth.  Understanding the available resources is a prerequisite for formulating sound policies on resources and land-access. Geoscience Australia prepares a national inventory of resource stocks and these are reported in the online publication Australia’s Identified Mineral Resources (AIMR).

Companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange are required to report publicly on ore reserves and mineral resources under their control, using the Joint Ore Reserves Committee Code (JORC). Data reported for individual deposits by mining companies are compiled in Geoscience Australia’s national mineral resources database and used in the preparation of the annual national assessments of Australia’s mineral resources. National resources are reported in categories of the National Mineral Resources classification system. This involves aggregating JORC categories into a smaller number of categories in the national system. The national inventory provides a long term national perspective of what is likely to be available for mining.

AIMR 2009 includes data on company estimates of ore reserves as well as evaluations of long-term trends in mineral resources, international rankings, recent developments in the mining industry, mine production, and summaries of recent exploration results.

At December 2008, Australia had the world’s largest economic resources of brown coal, mineral sands (rutile and zircon), nickel, silver, uranium, zinc and lead. The country also ranks among the top six worldwide for resources of bauxite, black coal, copper, gold, industrial diamond, iron ore, ilmenite, lithium, manganese ore, niobium, tantalum, vanadium and antimony.

Australia's mineral resources are adequate to ensure that the mining sector continues to hold the potential to remain the most important export earning sector of the Australian economy for the foreseeable future.

Mineral production

Australia has a comparative advantage in production of mineral commodities compared to most other countries. This stems from its rich and diverse mineral endowment, high quality regional scale geoscience information which lowers the risks of exploration, advanced exploration, mining and processing technologies, a skilled work force, generally benign physical conditions and low population density. These factors mean that modern mining can be undertaken in line with increasing community expectations for environmental and social performance.

World economic growth in recent years, particularly in China and India, has increased demand for mineral products worldwide. Australia is the world’s leading producer of bauxite and alumina, the second largest producer of uranium, lead and zinc, the third largest producer of iron ore, nickel, manganese ores and gold and the fourth largest producer of black coal, silver and copper.

Although there have been significant increases in Australian mine production, Australia’s share of annual world production for most mineral commodities has declined in the past five years, with the largest declines for bauxite, lead, nickel, zinc and zircon. Large, low cost mining operations also have commenced in overseas countries in recent years.

Even though Australia has large economic resources of many mineral commodities, this is not a guarantee that such resources will continue to be exploited in Australia. In an increasingly globalised and competitive commodity market, multinational mining companies continue to search for mineral deposits that will offer attractive returns on investment. Such returns are influenced by the quality of the resources (grade, tonnage, metallurgical properties) as well as environmental, social and political factors, land access and the location and scale of competing projects. Increasingly, minerals projects are being ranked by multinational companies against investment returns from other projects worldwide particularly during periods of global financial stress. This has resulted in a number of mine closures in Australia. In the case of nickel, multinational companies closed sulphide and lateritic nickel mines in Western Australia and Tasmania during 2008 and consolidated their operations at larger, low cost mining operations, sometimes outside Australia. However with recent recovery in the nickel prices, mining companies have returned to re-evaluate these projects.

Mining Regulation

Regulation of Australian mining industry is the responsibility of State and Territory government agencies. These agencies administer a range of mining, health and safety regulations/legislation relevant to the mining industry. State government mines departments are responsible for granting exploration and mining tenements and for collecting mining royalty payments from the companies

Mineral exports

The minerals industry is Australia’s largest export earner with mineral exports accounting for nearly 50 per cent of the annual value of total exports of goods and services in recent years. In current dollar terms, the value of Australian mineral exports (excluding petroleum, natural gas and petroleum refinery products) increased from $45.9 billion in 2002-03 to a record level of $139.4 billion in 2008-09, dominated by coal, iron ore, bauxite/aluminium, copper, nickel and gold. The major increase in the overall value of mineral exports in this period reflects increases in both production and commodity prices.

For some years Australia has been the world’s largest exporter of black coal, iron ore and gold.

Impacts of improved technologies

In recent decades, improvements in mining techniques (including large scale mining equipment and automation) have reduced mining costs and allowed economic extraction of deposits which previously were uneconomic. New metallurgical techniques and breakthroughs (eg carbon based leaching technologies for gold deposits) have improved the rate of recoveries of metals/minerals from various deposits, resulted in major increases in economic resources of certain commodities and enhanced the viability of know deposits for some commodities such as lateritic nickel deposits.

Maintaining the economic impact of Australia’s mineral industry

AIMR2009 shows that there have been very few world class discoveries in Australia in the past two decades and that the inventory has been sustained largely through delineation of additional resources in known mineral fields. Most of Australia's current mineral production and exports are sourced from deposits discovered during exploration more than two decades ago.

Sustaining the strength of the minerals sector is dependent on:

• discovering a new generation of large low cost mineral deposits to sustain the resource base, and
• increasing mine production to maintain world market share for major mineral commodities. All this will require new approaches to exploration, mining and processing, together with good supporting infrastructure and access to land and finance.

Australia’s Identified Mineral Resources and other fundamental data on the minerals sector can be obtained from the Australian Atlas of Mineral Resources, Mines and Processing Centres.