Mineral and Energy Resources

Mr GEE (Napier) (14:40): My question is to the Minister for Mineral Resources and Energy. Can the minister provide advice on the recent progress in establishing Adelaide as a national ICT hub for the mining and energy resources sector?

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS (West Torrens—Treasurer, Minister for Finance, Minister for State Development, Minister for Mineral Resources and Energy, Minister for Small Business) (14:40): I thank the honourable member for his question.

Ms Chapman interjecting:

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS: I do not think EPAS deals with the mining sector, but I am sure it is going to be a very good system.

The SPEAKER: The Treasurer will not respond to the interjections of the refreshed deputy leader.

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS: Yes, sir. Recently, the state's leading information and communication technology providers met to discuss potential projects and innovations to support our state's mineral and energy resources sector. These discussions were held during a meeting of the ICT Roadmap Industry Round Table. The round table is a key project of the state government's Mining and Petroleum Services Centre of Excellence.

The ICT roadmap initiative links together two of the state government's key priorities of growth through innovation and unlocking the full potential of South Australia's resources and energy and renewable assets. The round table is about providing a platform for information sharing as an integral first step in creating connections that will see real progress in the ICT sector for the resources sector. It also helps identify key issues and problems in the resources industry that might be addressed using ICT solutions and build the necessary collaborative relationships to start delivering the solutions.

Keynote presentations at the round table looked at a number of real, practical examples of how innovative ICT applications can assist the mining industry. For example, Mr Steve Sullivan from Maptech talked about the potential to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as an innovative tool in minerals exploration. As members will know, geophysical data collection by aerial survey is crucial when exploring for ore deposits obscured by groundcover.

At the moment, gathering data requires the use of dedicated aircraft flown by a commercial pilot accompanied by a highly specialised geophysical operator. This is expensive for a lot of junior mining explorers. The development of a UAV data collection system has the potential to improve the speed of acquisition and increase the data density at an affordable cost for explorers to be able to operate themselves.

Mr John Kamuchau from Startup Adelaide also discussed ways of celebrating industry innovation and problem solving in the resources sector. Current methods of problem solving in the industry are time consuming and expensive, and Startup Adelaide talked about where opportunities might exist for South Australia's young entrepreneurs to develop more cost-effective, innovative solutions.

They propose an industry 'hackathon' event that brings together industry problems, domain experts and solution developers, software developers, data scientists, mathematicians and academics. The aim of the event would be for developers to build prototype solutions to industry problems under the guidance of domain experts and present this solution at the end of the event for the opportunity to win a prize or have further conversations about implementing the solutions.

I am sure all members of this house will, hopefully, agree that a globally competitive resource sector is integral to the state's continued prosperity and support this important initiative.