Department of Mineral Resources

Exploration Licences

  • Purpose

Exploration licences are designed to allow companies to acquire speculative and/or proprietary seismic, gravity, magnetic, geochemical and sea-bed data. They do not allow drilling deeper than 350 m below the sea bed.

They are governed by the Offshore Petroleum (Licensing) Regulations 2000 and the Petroleum Survey Licenses (Model Clauses) Regulations 1992 which can be downloaded here.

  • Application

Exploration licences are not area specific and can apply to all of the designated area (or smaller areas as agreed). 

Activities undertaken under an exploration licence may extend into a production licence area only with the consent of the production licence holder.

If a production licence holder is using a third party to acquire data on its behalf within its production licence area, it must ensure that the third party holds an exploration licence in its own right in order to conduct such surveys. Production licence holders do not require an exploration licence unless they intend to conduct surveys themselves outside the confines of their production licence areas.

  • Duration

An exploration licence is normally issued for one year, renewable for up to three years.

  • Notification

The Director of Mineral Resources (DMR) must be notified of all surveys to be conducted under an exploration license at least 30 days in advance of operations beginning. The proposed survey information will be circulated to relevant stakeholders for comments, this is likely to include, but is not limited to, the Department of Fisheries, Department of Environmental Planning and British Geological Survey.

Operators must complete a PON3 (Notification of Geophysical Surveys) form available on Regulation- PONs page.

  • Data management

Holders of exploration licences are required to supply copies of all data to the Governor (or more usually to the British Geological Survey). All data will be held in confidence by the Falkland Islands Government for a period of 5.5 years or >10years for Seismic Data acquired under exclusive licence arrangements (or longer as determined by the Governor) but may then be released to the public.

The Falkland Islands Government, in collaboration with the South Atlantic Research Institute (SAERI) also requests that a metadata record is submitted to the IMS-GIS data centre for any environmental survey (i.e. benthic sampling).

Please see the Regulation - Data Management for guidance and access to the metadata form and data management policy (applicable to non-commercial environmental data).

More information can be obtained from the SAERI website or from DMR.