On 28 March 2018 Assistant Minister for Science, Jobs and Innovation, Zed Seselja, and Minister for Resources and Northern Australia, Matt Canavan, announced $50 million of Australian Government funding for MinEx CRC. MinEx CRC is a major endeavour comprising: $50M cash from the CRC Programme; $41M cash from geological surveys and from industry; $49M non-staff in-kind, and; $78M or 311FTE staff in-kind for a total of $218M. MinEx CRC’s research will include the following.

• Developing more productive, safer and environmentally-friendly drilling methods to discover and drill-out deposits, including coiled tubing drilling technology.
• Developing new technologies for collecting data while drilling, bringing forward mine production.
• Implementation of a National Drilling Initiative (NDI) – a world-first collaboration of Geological Surveys, researchers and industry that will undertake drilling in under-explored areas of potential mineral wealth in Australia.