The revival of Victoria’s gold sector, coupled with emerging opportunities in other base metals, mineral sands, geothermal energy, and some of Australia’s most likely locations for underground carbon storage, will all be on the agenda at the 2009 Paydirt Resources Victoria Conference. Since 2008, Victoria’s minerals industry has been bolstered by a variety of legislative and incentive-driven advances – most notably the passage in February of the 2009 Resource Industries Legislation Amendment Act, which from next year will begin to reduce regulatory burdens on mining and exploration ventures across the State. Victoria’s Department of Primary Industries has gone on the front foot in attracting greater mineral exploration through its ‘Rediscover Victoria’ initiative, which has committed an initial A$5 million to support drilling programs and other exploration work in new or previously unexplored parts of the State.
At Melbourne’s Hilton on the Park from August 17 – 19, the Paydirt Conference – which follows on from a highly successful inaugural event at the same location last year – will be officially opened by Victoria’s Minister for Energy and Resources, the Honourable Peter Batchelor, shortly after 9 AM on Monday August 17.
More than 300 delegates are expected to attend over the three-day conference, including a broad variety of mining and exploration executives, bankers and brokers, industry analysts, engineers, geologists, mining services and equipment suppliers, and heritage and community relations specialists.
Despite the recent scaling back of Lihir Gold’s Ballarat mine, gold production continues to flourish at Victoria’s two largest operating gold mines in Stawell and Fosterville near Bendigo – and the State Government is confidently predicting that production this year will easily outstrip the 6 t of gold produced in Victoria in 2008.
High on the agenda at next week’s Conference will be the key role that Victoria has to play in the growing demand for geosequestration, or deep underground storage, of greenhouse gases, which has developed into an important plank of the Australian Government’s long-term carbon reduction strategy.
Among the key speakers will be Peter Cook, CEO of the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (CO2CRC), one of the world’s leading carbon capture and storage (CCS) research organisations, which only last week was boosted by a A$20 million grant from the Federal Government’s Cooperative Research Centres Program.
CO2CRC now has three CCS demonstration projects in operation, including the widely watched Otway project in southwest Victoria, where carbon dioxide has been successfully injected and stored 2 km underground. Also presenting at the Paydirt Conference will be Charlie Speirs, Director of the newly formed State Government body, Clean Coal Victoria, which has been handed the complex challenge of engineering lower-emissions uses for Latrobe Valley’s huge brown coal reserves – source of 90% of Victoria’s power generation.
Major industry bodies that will provide presentations during the first two days of the Conference include GeoScience Victoria, the Australian Geothermal Energy Association, and the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association.
On the third day of the Conference – August 19 – a technical forum offers delegates the opportunity to access the latest world class geoscientific data and information from GeoScience Victoria, including new seismic data from its ‘Gold Undercover’ project and new regional 3D models from the Rediscover Victoria initiative.
