South Australia

Back in 1850, South Australia was producing a third of the world’s copper and was known around the world, as the “Copper Kingdom”.   Discoveries of copper near Glen Osmond spurred the growth of South Australia, underpinned the flourishing city of Adelaide and funding many of the grand buildings that now give the city its distinct character.

South Australia holds 68% of Australia’s economically demonstrated copper resources, 27.5% of Australia’s economically demonstrated gold resources, 80% of Australia’s identified uranium resources and 14 billion tonnes of identified iron ore resources.

The Gawler Craton in South Australia is best known for iron oxide copper-gold (IOCG) deposits, as exemplified by Olympic Dam, which is the fourth largest copper mine and boasts the largest known single deposit of uranium in the world.

Mineral exploration expenditure in South Australia reached a 13-year high of $293.1 million in 2023, almost double the expenditure of $128.3 million in 2022.  South Australia is a major copper jurisdiction and $178.3 million was spent on the search for copper with much of this related to expenditure on the Oak Dam resource definition. This was followed by $31.9 million spent searching for ‘other’ minerals, $31.7 million for iron ore, $26.8 million for uranium, $14.2 million for gold and $0.2 million for mineral sands.