A road map to a better resources future

Developing Victoria’s resources takes much more than simply drilling a well or digging a hole. But the development of entire new industries takes even more effort and planning so the Victorian Government has created an ‘Innovation Roadmap’ to help smoothe the path for the expansion of the state’s earth resources industries. As part of the Victorian Government’s Provincial Victoria statement, entitled ‘Moving Forward’ the Innovation Roadmap project has established a vision and development pathway for technology in the resources sector, a key and growing sector for provincial Victoria.

The list of new resources sector developments in Victoria is as impressive for its variety as its length. Since 1999 there has been more than $4 billion spent on new projects in Victoria. These include new gold projects at Ballarat, Bendigo and Costerfield, mineral sands operations near Hamilton, brown coal operations in the Latrobe Valley, major new offshore gas projects in the Otway and Bass basins off the state’s south coast and a major new offshore oil project in Bass Strait. The list continues as well with another $5.5 billion worth of resources projects currently on the drawing board in Victoria.

The Innovation Roadmap has been developed as an adjunct to the highly successful VIMP and Gold Undercover projects, which have been partly responsible for the big increase in interest in Victoria’s mineral and energy potential. The target of much of the Gold Undercover work and the new exploration is to unlock the potentially large undiscovered gold resource adjacent to Victoria’s Golden Triangle, that is covered by blanket of recent sediments. There the potential prize is 80 million ounces of gold with a current day value of over A$60 billion.

Specifically the Innovation Roadmap is designed to identify strategic research and development priorities as well as exposing the barriers to investment in Victoria. The Innovation Roadmaps have targeted the gold, mineral sands, coal, stone construction materials, gas and oil sectors. A consultant (STEM Partnership) was commissioned to undertake the studies required to develop the Innovation Roadmap with the final report completed in August 2006. The work was jointly funded with more than $250,000 and strongly supported by the departments of Primary Industry, Innovation, Industry and Regional Development and Sustainability and Environment, together with industry groups Minerals Council of Australia, Victorian Division, Cement Concrete & Aggregates Australia, Origin Energy, BHPBilliton and research providers CSIRO, University of Melbourne, Monash University and University of Ballarat.

The broad focus on sharing and applying knowledge in the resources industry has the potential to deliver better exploration, development and processing efficiency, improved environmental performance and community support. The Government's aim is to facilitate a more coordinated approach to research and technology development to benefit Victoria’s earth resources sector and the community. The need for greater coordination emerged from the joint industry, government and research provider workshop held in May, 2004.

The road maps identified key innovation pathways across the whole resources value chain, including geosciences, extraction, processing and environmental technologies and social and community sciences. A total of 34 priority areas of innovation were deemed as having high importance to the success of the industry in Victoria, covering cross sector issues such as reducing the dependence on water, protecting the environment, community partnerships with industry, finding new resources, quality people as the primary resource and zero fatalities, zero injuries and zero incidents. Priority innovation areas within each of the commodity groups were also identified.

The STEM Partnership held five focus workshops in 2005 with over 100 participants to prepare the production of the final report.

A brochure and the report are provided in PDF format. Note that you may need to download the free Acrobat Reader in order to view or print the document.

Victorian Earth Resources - Roadmap brochure (PDF 1.4MB)

Victorian Earth Resources - Roadmap pt1 (PDF 782KB)
Victorian Earth Resources - Roadmap pt2 (PDF 1.8MB)


For more information contact:
Cliff Kavonic
Director - Business Development and Technology Branch
Phone: 03 9658 4738