| On 1 October 2020, the then Treasurer, Minister for Infrastructure and Planning, the Honourable Cameron Dick MP, announced that a re-elected Palaszczuk Government would deliver a Queensland Resource Industry Development Plan (QRIDP). The Treasurer announced that a focus in the QRIDP will be “to assist explorers discover the next deposits, through future rounds of the existing Collaborative Exploration Initiative.”
The Department of Resources is responsible for implementing the election commitment to deliver a QRIDP.
The Queensland Government’s Collaborative Exploration Initiative (CEI) is a grants program that provides financial and technical support to mineral explorers. It was preceded by the Collaborative Drilling Initiative, which began 2007. The CEI program is an adjunct to broader, government-led pre-competitive geoscience programs, spanning large scale, regional data acquisition programs through to collaborative research programs with academia.
The CEI program is run by the Department of Resources’ Geological Survey of Queensland (GSQ) and was established in 2017. The purpose of the program is to provide funding assistance to test high risk, frontier exploration or innovative exploration concepts aiming to develop a new understanding of the geology and prospectivity. The program is also aimed at expanding exploration into under-explored areas.
The Department of Resources is seeking a suitable supplier with expertise in the resources sector and a strong understanding of the economic impacts of incentive schemes and pre-competitive geoscience programs for the resources sector to undertake a review of the effectiveness of financial support provided by the Queensland Government to the exploration sector.
This review will have two areas of focus:
1. The CEI program: examining the exploration and discovery efficacy and efficiency of a large program of small grants to explorers; the benefits of targeting specific areas or commodity types, while noting that exploration activity is heavily correlated to commodity prices and outlook. It will also examine the most appropriate way to structure the financial, technical and wider support. The analysis will identify which programs are likely to repeat previous successes and target those areas which would not otherwise proceed without government intervention.
The suitable supplier is also asked to provide advice on other financial arrangements which are available to government beyond exploration grants (for example, equity shares or exploration grants tied to land released for tender). The intent of this analysis will be to inform the Department on what funding options are available to government into the future, which would support the development of future resource projects (both exploration and production).
2. Pre-competitive geoscience programs: being the state, province and regional scale works led by government and or in association with other government agencies (CSIRO and Geoscience Australia) and academic institutions.
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