
The Northern Territory government is intent on establishing itself as one of the mining powerhouses of the Australian economy.
To help the NT in its goal to grow its resources sector, the government has provided a significant amount of financial support to its geological and mineral exploration sectors.
In June, the NT government awarded a record $4 million in co-funding for round 17 of its Geophysics and Drilling Collaborations (GDC) program.
As part of the $9.5 million Resourcing the Territory strategy, the funding aims to enhance exploration success by backing projects that address knowledge gaps, advance innovative field activities, as well as support the possible discovery and development of new ore bodies.
In turn, it is expected these results should stimulate economic success by boosting industry innovation while providing new data to both the minerals sector and the public domain.
This couldn’t have come at a better time given the NT’s mining industry — in which three of the world’s biggest resources houses have a significant stake – is reasonably mature, with the arrival of new projects being few and far between.
For instance, RTA Gove Pty Ltd’s Gove bauxite operation, a wholly-owned enterprise of Rio Tinto and located some 700 kilometres east of Darwin, is set to shut down in 2030 after almost 60 years of operations.
Meanwhile, two other established majors, Newmont Corporation’s Tanami gold mine (situated 650 km northwest of Alice Springs and opened in 1986) and Glencore’s McArthur of Darwin which was first mined in 1995) are projected to shut down in 2040.
Additionally, it hasn’t been an easy ride for the new miners, with Core Lithium reporting in its March quarterly that site activities at its recently-opened Finness lithium operation, based some 88 km southwest of Darwin, had ceased during January due primarily to an 85 per cent drop in the critical mineral’s price.
The mid-tier company also reported a 14 per cent decrease in quarterly spodumene concentrate production to 24,927 tonnes from 28,837t in the second quarter of 2024 — due to a five-day planned shutdown for operations maintenance (although this was partially offset by higher recoveries).
Interestingly, Core was one of the winners in the latest GDC round and is set to receive financial backing in three categories (brownfields diamond drilling, innovative targeting and advancing critical minerals) in the 2024-25 financial year.
Run by the NT Geological Survey (NTGS), the program is supporting 41 projects operated by 29 companies — ranging from early stage to near development — and will see the data and drill core collections across 10 geological provinces completed and analysed. This information will eventually become publicly available in August 2025, or six months after acquisition (whichever is earlier).
The value of geoscience investment
Just before the GDC announcement, Deloitte reported that another NT government $26 million four-year exploration initiative that ran from 2018-22, had been “instrumental” in building geoscience knowledge, fostering exploration efforts and promoting the territory’s mineral potential.
This was grounded in the tangible benefits observed, industry endorsements and the strategic importance of sustaining a program which contributed significantly to the growth and competitiveness of the NT’s resources industry.
The initiative covered four key program areas — pre-competitive geoscience, exploration grants, data accessibility as well the promotion of mineral prospectivity.
Spending money on pre-competitive geoscience, Deloitte said, was one of the most significant things the government could do to de-risk investment while increasing the possibility of successful resource projects becoming significant contributors to the NT’s bottom line.
In 2021-22 alone, pre-competitive geoscientific data production, including that generated by the NTGS and Geoscience Australia (GA), resulted in a $5.5 billion injection into the territory’s economy.
Moreover, it supported 5,203 full-time equivalent hours across the Top End’s value chain during the same period.
“The commencement of the initiative in 2018 correlated with a rise in exploration expenditure in the Northern Territory,” Deloitte said.
“Since 2018, there has been a noticeable increase in exploration expenditure, with a 38 per cent overall increase between 2018 and 2022.
“The mineral exploration activity in the NT reached its highest levels in over a decade in 2021-22.
“It is estimated that the initiative directly supported approximately 100 positions between 2018 and 2022.”
Case studies, Deloitte noted, demonstrated that pre-competitive geoscience, legacy data and exploration grants had led to substantial investments in the NT, including expenditures from major mining companies through joint ventures and partnerships.
All the stakeholders consulted for the purpose of the evaluation — including industry stakeholders and peak bodies such as the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies, the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) and collaborative research partners like the CSIRO and GA — strongly supported the maintenance (or expansion) of the initiative.
“At the end of 2018, 11 per cent of the NT was covered by granted exploration licences, which increased to 22 per cent by the end of 2022,” Deloitte added.
NT’s global investment attraction
Further plaudits were directed at the territory’s minerals sector when the Fraser Institute ranked the territory eighth in the world in its 2023 Investment Attractiveness Index (IAI), with its Policy Perception Index (PPI) score increasing a little over nine points, jumping up from 25th (of 62) in 2013 to 22nd (of 86) in 2023.
This positioned it with other desirable global exploration destinations like (from first) the US states of Utah and Nevada, Saskatchewan (Canada), Western Australia, Quebec and Manitoba (both Canada), Arizona (the US) and, in ninth and tenth spots, the Canadian provinces of Newfoundland/Labrador and Ontario.
According to the institute’s Julio Meja and Elmira Aliakbari, the IAI is a composite index that combines both the PPI and the results from the Best Practices Mineral Potential Index.
“While it is useful to measure the attractiveness of a jurisdiction based on policy factors such as onerous regulations, taxation levels, the quality of infrastructure, and the other policy-related questions that respondents answered, the PPI alone does not recognise the fact that investment decisions are often sizably-based on the pure mineral potential of a jurisdiction,” they said.
“This year the miners returned negative scores when it came to the quality of the geological database (minus 22 points) and uncertainty regarding the administration and enforcement of regulations (minus 19) as well as the territory’s legal system (minus 18).”
While this observation didn’t stop the MCA from praising the efforts of the NT government for its 2024-25 exploration expenditure, it was mindful that a longer mining pipeline was needed to ensure continued growth.
“In 2022-23, the resources industry accounted for 28 per cent of the territory’s output, making it the largest contributor to economic production,” MCA’s Cathryn Tilmouth said.
“There was a small reduction in royalties due to closures and the impacts of Cyclone Megan, but the mining industry is well placed to continue its leading contribution to the economy in the future if the government delivers on policies to secure new investments.
“With a number of NT mines set to hit their end of life by the end of this decade, the NT economy will face a drop in royalties if there are no new mining projects to take their place.
“The Minerals Council of Australia welcomes the ongoing investment in exploration through the $9.5 million commitment to the NT Geological Services’ Resourcing the Territory program.
“However, more work needs to be done to convert these discoveries into operating projects that can provide the benefits of jobs and investment for Territorians.
“The MCA also welcomes the investment in workforce development — especially vocational education and training. The NT needs to increase the capability and capacity of the local workforce to meet the demands of any future projects.”
Growing NT’s critical minerals capacity
Certainly, the NT government is aware of this, judging from a report it recently published on the Top End’s critical minerals endowment.
“Global demand is rapidly growing for critical minerals, presenting a substantial economic and strategic opportunity for the Northern Territory and our partners to develop secure supply chains to support the clean energy transformation,” its mining minister Mark Monaghan noted.
“We are also ensuring that the right policy settings are in place to be globally competitive while remaining committed to sustainable practices and mine rehabilitation.
“With the increasing focus in our key markets on environmental, social and governance (ESG) credentials and tracking of whole-of-life carbon emissions for critical minerals projects, there are also real opportunities for the territory to derive a competitive advantage as an ethical and environmentally responsible supplier of critical minerals, including downstream processing and manufacturing.”
This may be the reason why Transition Minerals Ltd (TML) was one of the recipients of the latest round of grants, a company is developing its Barkly total rare earths elements (TREE) project in the NT’s northern Barkly region, where it has already assessed an initial rare earths inferred mineral resource of 40 million tonnes at 2,100 parts per million TREE.
This resource comprises a 33 per cent neodymium and praseodymium ratio and lies metres below a body of vanadium and gallium mineralisation (200 Mt at 0.12 per cent vanadium oxide and 30 ppm gallium) that starts from the surface.
The company has been awarded the maximum allowance of $50,000 and now plans to conduct metallurgical test work which will include multi-gravity separation, wet high-intensity magnetic separation, batch flotation, heat treatment and ammonium sulphate leaching, as well as proprietary pyrophosphoric acid treatment.
Last year, TML said common acid leach yields extraction rates of up to 74 per cent neodymium and praseodymium were already established within an overall 73 per cent extraction of TREE.
“The extraction rates achieved, in conjunction with the exceptional grade and composition recently determined, firmly place the Barkly rare earths deposit on the map as a globally significant, regolith-hosted, critical minerals deposit,” the company’s managing director Toby Foster said.