The US Bureau of Mines Land and Mineral Resources Program and the Minerals Availability System (MAS)

This paper describes the development and current use of the MAS. The MAS database contains location and identification information on nearly 200,000 mineral locations. This subset of the database is called the Mineral Industry Location System (MILS). The primary focus of MILS is on domestic sites with some form of past, present, or potential future minerals activity. Worldwide, over 5000 of the most significant mineral locations are monitored, with nearly 2500 having been evaluated to obtain estimates of deposit tonnage, grade, and costs at the preliminary feasibility level. Economic evaluations are performed using the mine simulation computer program (MINSIM) to determine the discounted cash flow rate of return and net present value of individual deposits. Groups of deposits are analyzed using the Supply Analysis Model (SAM) to develop availability curves that portray the quantity of recoverable material at an average unit price and at a specific rate of return on capital. Although the original justification for the development of the MAS was to facilitate the analysis of the worldwide availability of minerals, in recent years, the MAS and its supporting analytical methodologies have proven useful for investigating a much wider variety of land and mineral resources problems and issues. Examples of these include (1) the assessment of mineral potential on Federal lands, (2) defining the extent to which land use restrictions have placed geologically favorable lands off limits for mineral development, (3) quantitatively assessing the amount of economically recoverable coal in various regions, (4) examining the competitive effects of increased coal exports from major producing countries, and (5) determining the cost impacts of environmental regulatory compliance by the minerals industry.