James Johnson knows a thing or two about rocks.
But after decades studying the millions of square kilometres of land known as Australia, he is still intrigued about what else is out there.
“There’s an awful lot more to learn about our continent,” he said.
“Some years back, we came up with a metric that around 80 per cent of our continent was under explored — that was probably 10 years ago.
“It would be marginally less now … but it’s still a very high proportion that is under explored.”
The chief executive of Geoscience Australia is about to oversee an ambitious project for the agency, after being promised $566 million over the next 10 years by the Albanese government.
“I’m jumping out of my skin with excitement,” Dr Johnson said in an interview with the ABC’s Afternoon Briefing.
The funding boost will go towards mapping the nation’s most precious commodities – critical minerals needed for high-tech manufacturing in renewable energy, defence and communications equipment.
They are resources that Australia is believed to have in abundance, which it needs for its national security, and could earn a fortune from digging up – if only it knew where it all was.
Even with the concession there is still plenty to learn about the nation’s mineral deposits, Dr Johnson argued Australia was a world leader in exploration and research.
“Some of our key competitor countries that have similar high resource endowment have looked with envy at our approach and have started doing the same,” he told the ABC.
“Having said that, the Canadians, for example, leapfrogged us in terms of level of investment.
“This squares up the ledger, if you will — but in terms of the techniques, they were looking to us as a role model in effect, so we’re right up there with the best.”
Dr Johnson said there had been a change in attitude from governments over the last decade, acknowledging the worth of critical minerals – in terms of dollar and strategic value.
Chief executive of Geoscience Australia since 2017, he was coy when asked how long he has been campaigning for the funding.
“Never ask a government agency how much money they’d like to have,” he quipped.
Hanging a clothesline from a helicopter
The task for Geoscience Australia is to map out potential deposits of 31 critical minerals, such as cobalt and lithium, and five strategic materials, including copper and zinc.
The agency will also be trying to plot where Australia’s groundwater sources are.
“Because there’s no enterprise that is carried out across Australia that doesn’t rely on water in some form,” Dr Johnson said.
“We fly fixed-wing aircraft, sometimes we fly helicopters, and there’s a somewhat amusing analogy with one of the instruments that effectively looks like someone’s hanging a Hills Hoist below a helicopter.
“It’s actually sending out pulses of magnetism into the ground and returns an electrical signal that becomes a magnetic signal received back at the chopper.
“We also do ground based surveys, good old fashioned geological mapping where required.”
Stepping in before private mining companies
Finding the minerals, or at least predicting where they may be, is just the first step.
Dr Johnson stressed commercial mining operations would benefit from the work, but that government funding for mapping was required to unlock that potential.
“It happens before private sector investment but not instead of it,” he said.
“Our work does not get as far as identifying a specific mineral deposit — what we do is we identify tracts of ground that are more prospective for commodity X — let’s call it lithium for sake of argument — than the adjacent tracts of ground.
“So we’re narrowing down that search space, we release that information to all of the corporate sector at once so that no one gets a competitive advantage over another company, and then it’s up to their levels of interest for that commodity as to whether they’re going to take up exploration licenses in that area.”
Dr Johnson pointed to some work Geoscience Australia had done to identify potential nickel deposits during the past decade.
“We were successfully able to map out, or reverse engineer if you will, where the known deposits are, but highlighted a whole lot of other areas of high prospectivity,” he said.
“And that’s actually led one company, Challis Mining to take up ground north east of Perth and they’ve made a significant discovery in the Gonneville deposit — one of the great nickel platinum group element discoveries of the last 20 years.”
The ‘pressure point’ — finding the staff to map the nation
When announcing the mapping funding, Resources Minister Madeleine King said the plan was a key part of the Albanese government’s Future Made in Australia policy.
“The road to net zero runs through Australia’s resources sector,” she said.
“This funding will ensure we can draw the map for our resources companies to find the minerals we need to drive our economy and build the technology we need to reduce emissions.”
But ensuring the workforce is there to carry out the landmark task will be important.
“It’s a pressure point there,” Dr Johnson said.
“We need to maintain a focus on attracting people into the sector, because we do need to feed that pipeline of the next generation of professionals.
“We’re under pressure at the moment, but we’re doing our best to attract people into the sector because what we’re talking about is effectively finding the critical minerals to help Australia reach Net Zero to decarbonise our economy.
“These are minerals that are all about renewable technologies and modern tech, and if we can rightly identify that this sort of work is part of the decarbonisation solution that should attract a good cohort of people into the sector.”