Exploring for the Future – precompetitive geoscience insight for resource discovery and development

The world is turning to the mining sector to resource the Net Zero transition and meet sustainable development goals. It is generally agreed that global inventories of critical minerals, strategic materials, natural hydrogen, and carbon sequestration sites are insufficient to meet forecast demand thereby necessitating new discovery and development. At the same time exploration success rates are declining across the world as resources become harder to discover and develop. These factors are compounded by the long average lead time from discovery to resource extraction, making the imperative to act now to ensure a sustainable resource pipeline. To reverse this worrying trend Australia has invested heavily into precompetitive geoscience aimed at characterising the geological, geochemical, and geophysical architecture of Australia from the surface to the mantle and across scales from which new insights into the spatiotemporal controls on resource distribution are emerging. Uptake of this information by Australia’s entrepreneurial exploration sector has led to the highest exploration success rate in the world. Here, we will review the value of precompetitive geoscience in Australia within a global context and showcase results arising from the Exploring for the Future program, Australia’s flagship investment in precompetitive geoscience of $225 m over the last eight years.  Specifically, we will highlight new insights into processes controlling the spatiotemporal distribution of sediment and crystalline basement-hosted mineral systems arising from assessments of the predictive power of new national datasets (e.g., passive seismic, magnetotelluric, airborne electromagnetic and isotopic maps). We will conclude with how these insights can be integrated across scale within a systems framework to test the resource potential of frontier region for metals as well as hydrogen and carbon capture and storage.