Over 600 mineral exploration project reports now available through the UK Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre

Following the first data release in July 2023, which captured reports from Scotland and the north of England, the Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre (CMIC) has completed scanning all the Mineral Exploration and Investigation Grants Act (MEIGA) reports that are held at BGS. This release includes Wales and the south-west of England.

What is MEIGA?

MEIGA was funded under the former Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) through grants for mineral exploration of non-ferrous metals, fluorspar, barium and potash. CMIC is delivering the MEIGA reports in a geographically searchable, online and free-to-access format, making the data accessible for exploration companies to use to help refine areas that could be of interest to them.

The MEIGA reports contain:

• geological mapping
• soil and stream sediment geochemistry data
• geophysical surveys
• drill core logs
• assay data

We are delighted to have this final part of the dataset released publicly, as we believe pre-competitive data is an essential part of the exploration geologist’s toolkit that can help identify prospective areas for further exploration.

Eimear Deady, BGS Economic Geologist.

What information does the new release contain?

The south-west of England and parts of Wales were identified as areas of interest in a recent report on critical raw material (CRM) prospectivity in the UK (Deady et al., 2023). Many CRMs are the co- and byproducts of base metals and other metals previously explored for and mined across Wales and south-west England.

For example, areas of Wales covered by MEIGA reports may have the potential for CRMs associated with a deposit type known as volcanogenic massive sulfides. These are typically mined for copper but have the potential to also contain CRMs such as indium, tellurium or bismuth. Other deposits in Wales include historic gold deposits, which could contain other CRMs such as tellurium, bismuth or antimony but have not been evaluated using modern analytical methods.

CMIC works closely with the Department for Business & Trade, which funds CMIC, and this data supports the UK Government’s Critical Minerals Strategy by providing accessible historical information to companies wishing to explore the UK’s critical mineral potential.

More information

• Access the MEIGA reports on the CMIC website
• Find out more about the previous release of reports
• Geological material collected in the 1970s and 1980s is available via BGS through the Core Store booking process and the GeoIndex, where anyone can explore the MEIGA report areas