Submit annual and final reports on mineral titles
If you hold an exploration licence, exploration licence in retention or mineral lease, you must report all exploration and other technical work.
Each year, you must report on the activities during the previous 12 months in an annual report.
If a title is surrendered, ceased, expires or is cancelled in whole or in part, a final report must be submitted.
If the entire title is surrendered, a final report summarising all activity over the life of the title and details of all activities undertaken since the last annual report must be submitted.
The final report will also include the expenditure for the period since the period covered by the last expenditure report submitted.
Exploration title holders have a requirement to reduce the title at various times. A final report is referred to as a partial relinquishment report if the report covers the part of a title relinquished during the exploration licence reduction process.
What to report
You must report on all geological, geophysical and geochemical activities and submit the associated data.
Details of what must be reported and the data formats to be used are included in guidelines below.
Your reported exploration activities must match your claims in the expenditure report for the same reporting period. Read about expenditure reporting.
You may be able to combine multiple titles in to a single annual report if your titles are approved for amalgamated reporting by the department. Read about amalgamated reporting for mineral titles.
How to present your report
You must present all information in digital format and comply with the following guidelines.
Guideline 7: reporting on mineral titles DOCX (841.8 KB)
Guideline 7: reporting on mineral titles PDF (755.0 KB).
The guidelines contain details on formats for reports including images, geophysical data, drilling, geochemical and other sampling data, GIS and 3D models.
The guidelines are based on the national mineral reporting guidelines, Australian requirements for the submission of digital exploration data. For more information, go to the Australia Minerals website.
The report must contain all of the following information:
- a title page
- an abstract
- a body of text structured under meaningful headings
- a conclusion and recommendations for further work
- references and appendices as appropriate
- all data generated from exploration activities.
Report documents should meet all of the following specifications:
- they should be a text-generated PDF with thumbnails
- have no embedded files as attachments within the text of the original document or PDF. All associated files must be sent as separate files.
- hotlinks within and between documents are acceptable, but not encouraged, as they may not work if the files are separated
- have the pdf document security set to allow copying from, but not editing of, the document
- each individual PDF file should not exceed 10 MB.
To make sure geochemical, drilling and other sample or point located data is in the required format, get the Mineral Reporting Template Software on the Australia Minerals website.
Your report will be rejected if it does not comply with the data standards and guidelines. This could result in your report being late and you being charged late fees.
Acceptable media
You must submit all reports as digital files either via email or on a storage medium that is posted or hand-delivered to the department. Hard copies of reports will not be accepted.
FTP facilities are available for data up to 5GB.
Alternatively, for large datasets any of the following media will be accepted:
- CD-ROM, no multisession, read only
- DVD-ROM, no multisession, read only
- portable hard drive, non-returnable
- USB flash drives, non-returnable
- 3592 tape cartridges for large volume data sets, specifically seismic field data.
All media should be Windows-compatible, individually labelled with the company name, title number and sequentially numbered (e.g. 1/5). A full index of all files should be included in the report.
You should keep a duplicate back-up copy for at least a year to cover the possibility of physical damage, data loss or corruption during transit or within the department.
Read more about when and how to submit reports.
When to report
Annual reports are due 60 days after the end of each operational year.
However, the reporting date changes if your report is part of an amalgamated reporting group. Read more about amalgamated reporting for mineral titles.
Final and partial relinquishment reports are due 60 days after the expiry or surrender of the title.
For a summary of all reporting dates, read about when and how to submit reports.
Acceptance of the report
The department will not consider the submitted report until it receives all information.
You may be asked to correct and resubmit a report or data if it doesn't meet the guidelines. This could result in your report being late.
You may be charged a late fee if the corrected version is submitted past the deadline.
Process
Get the process flowchart for final report - exploration licence, exploration licence in retention or mineral lease PDF (180.5 KB).