Legislation
How Governments can play their part in improving the lifecycle of a mineral discovery Kate Dickson, Queensland Manager, Association of Mining and Exploration Companies
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tate and Federal Governments enjoy significant benefits from all the stages of the resources industry. This has been made clear, particularly during COVID-19 where exploration and mining could continue to operate safely, effectively, and with low and manageable risks and away from major population areas. In order to at least maintain or improve resource project development speed and reduce costs, there are some easy levers Governments can pull to help, such as: 1. Support industry initiatives 2. Infrastructure investment 3. Policy and regulatory stability Before we jump into what governments can do, let’s look at mineral project development and company value throughout these stages. Over the page, the chart adapted from Austex’s ‘Typical share price movement as project status changes’ represents the life stages of a junior mining or exploration company through different development phases. The Y-axis represents the company value throughout the various stages and the X-axis timeline is dependent on factors
like the deposit type and the jurisdiction the project is in, with the jurisdiction often impacting the approval timeframes for projects. Ideally, companies want to spend the least amount of time in the low value sections of the chart. So, how can Governments help with this necessary part of the process? Policy, grants and strategic infrastructure can assist resource projects when ‘traditional’ funding and valuations make project development difficult. But we’ll dig into this further later. The main areas where projects struggle, are at the ‘New Project and early exploration’, ‘Feasibility’ and ‘Permitting and project financing’ stages. State and Federal Governments are seeing the benefits of the exploration industry to the economy considering the recent announcements about the industry’s contributions to COVID-19 economic recovery. Most of the announcements have been to assist companies at the Pre-discovery stage. But there are levers within Governments’ control that can improve the success rate for projects struggling through the ‘Feasibility’ and ‘Permitting and project financing’ stages. 1. Support Industry Initiatives Grants are by far the easiest and quickest ways to get companies on the ground doing exploration. This helps companies in the ‘New project and early exploration’ stage. The Collaborative Drilling Initiative (CDI) in Queensland has been very successful, with recent rounds being significantly over-subscribed. Part of the reason the
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