Geoscience Australia - Minerals Data

It is the official answer to the question every mining model eventually asks: how much metal does Australia actually have left, and where does it sit? Geoscience Australia, the Australian Government's national geoscience agency, maintains the country's mineral endowment record, and this consolidated record bundles the whole portfolio.

The anchor is Australia's Identified Mineral Resources (AIMR), published annually since 1983 - more than forty years of unbroken national assessments. The current edition reports estimates as at 31 December 2024, resolving the national endowment into Economic Demonstrated Resources and JORC-compliant Ore Reserves across all major and some minor commodities: antimony, bauxite, black coal, cobalt, copper, diamond, gold, graphite, iron ore and peers, roughly twenty commodity layers in total.

The same assessment exists as geography, not just tables. Per-commodity deposit layers carry every entity as a point with its state, operating status, deposit type, size class and coordinates - the copper layer alone holds 406 deposit features. Around the core sit companion products: the Australian Mineral Exploration Review (AMER), reading calendar-year drilling activity since 2009 off expenditure and metres drilled plus ASX maiden-resource announcements; critical minerals chemistry data; and a global mineral chemistry database built for critical-minerals research.

Rows exactly as they arrive:

# one observation = one mineral deposit/entity within a commodity layer

dataset            : aimr_copper_layer
entity_id          : Abra
state              : WA
commodity          : Copper
current_status     : Deposit
units              : Mt
size_class         : <0.5
longitude          : 118.587279
latitude           : -24.643101

entity_id          : Altair
state              : WA
size_class         : <0.5
longitude          : 119.328772
latitude           : -27.045202

entity_id          : Andover
state              : WA
size_class         : <0.5
longitude          : 117.118200
latitude           : -20.854500

Read the shape, not just the values. One row is one place - a named deposit pinned to decimal degrees, carrying its commodity, its status and a banded size rather than a single tonnage figure. Because every commodity layer uses this identical grid, a copper point compares against an iron ore point without any re-keying, and filtering WA plus <0.5 returns the same three Western Australian deposits you see above.

Ten documented columns carry the spine, and each is defined below. The design worth understanding before you build is that the deposit layer is self-describing: identifier, location, status, geology and citation travel on every row, so a point extracted into your warehouse never loses its provenance.

entity_id names the deposit and state fixes its jurisdiction - together they make any deposit addressable in one filter, whether the question is Western Australian copper or Queensland lead-zinc. currentstatus separates what is already an operating mine from what remains a deposit in the ground, which is the field that turns this from a map into a supply pipeline screen.

mineraldeposittype carries the geological classification where recorded and units travels with the measure, because tonnages and grades share these tables and no conversion should be guessed. longitude and latitude pin the centroid in decimal degrees, and source closes the loop with a citation naming the publication and dataset handle behind the row.

The dictionary below is the verified core. Field sets can vary slightly between commodity layers - additional fields fold under additional fields on request and get confirmed when we cut your sample.

• Geo: Australia at national, state and individual-deposit level - the deposit points are the point here, not something folded into an appendix. Selected products extend further, to global mineral chemistry compilations.
• Temporal: AIMR editions are archived from 1983 onward, four decades of annual assessments; the current vintage reports as at 31 December 2024; AMER reads calendar-year activity since 2009.
• Granularity: individual deposit/entity points per commodity layer, aggregating cleanly to commodity, state and national totals.

One structural note: because every deposit row carries both its status and its size band, the panel supports a bottom-up build of any supply story - operating-mine-first if today's production is your question, deposit-first if tomorrow's pipeline is - without leaving the same table.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Pick the channel your stack already speaks and set the cadence to match the decision being fed. The annual assessment slots cleanly into overnight warehouse loads beside your production and price series; the GIS layers land as typed geometries ready to join on entity_id; the exploration reviews reward catching them the day they drop, because drilling-intensity shifts move the outlook narrative within weeks. Cadence changes are a settings conversation, not a re-integration project.

Every delivery ships with the full field dictionary and sample rows for validation, and the sibling products - gold resources detail, exploration reviews, chemistry compilations - ride the same channel once scoped rather than spawning a second pipeline.

Ranked by how directly one row settles the day job:

1. Metals and mining equity analysts. Reserve-and-resource tonnage by commodity beside deposit coordinates and operating status is the raw material of an Australian producer model - and the status flag tells you which entities belong in the mine-plan section and which stay in the optionality section.
2. Exploration investors and strategists. The AMER layer turns drilling intensity into a dated read on sentiment, and the deposit layers show where the industry is choosing to spend it - a screening universe of 406 copper deposits alone, banded by size and pinned to jurisdiction.
3. Critical-minerals planners and policy economists. A government assessment of who holds what, where, citable precisely because its author is the agency holding the national geoscientific record - the reference of choice when a critical-minerals strategy needs numbers no counterparty argues with.
4. GIS and market-entry teams. Coordinates, size classes and deposit types arrive analysis-ready, so service territories, logistics corridors and jurisdiction risk overlays build on real points instead of province centroids.

Investors and quants get the Australian supply side as typed rows - reserves and resources by commodity with deposit-level coordinates and status flags, plus four decades of editions to test how estimates convert into mines. Market researchers and consultants get the Australia chapter of any report assembled from one consistent government assessment instead of stitched commercial summaries. Data scientists get a spatially explicit panel where identifiers, jurisdictions and citations travel in-band, so feature engineering starts at analysis instead of parsing map figures. Developers and builders get the same layers delivered on a cadence they set, with the schema held steady between editions.

Three things, stated up front. First, respect the grain: this is an annual assessment, not a monthly market - the right tool for structural analysis, endowment ranking and citation, the wrong tool for intraday positioning, which belongs to a price feed paired alongside. Second, expect revision: each edition's figures revise in the following one, so a 31 December 2024 estimate is a snapshot that firms up next edition - build pipelines that re-pull rather than cache if your series touches the latest year. Third, the verified dictionary covers the ten core columns above; commodity layers can carry small field-set differences beyond them, so name the commodities you need when you scope the sample and we will confirm the exact column set before anything locks down in your pipeline.