Open database on global coal and metal mine production

This data set covers global extraction of coal and metal ores on an individual mine level. It covers
1171 individual mines in 80 different countries, reporting mine-level production for 80 different materials in the period 2000-2021. Furthermore, also data on mining coordinates, ownership, mineral reserves, mining waste, transportation of mining products,as well as mineral processing capacities (smelters and mineral refineries) and production is included. The data was gathered manually from more than 1900 openly available sources, such as annual or sustainability reports of mining companies. All datapoints are linked to their respective source documents. After manual screening and entry of the data, automatic cleaning, harmonization and data checking was conducted. Geoinformation was obtained either from coordinates available in company reports, or by retrieving the coordinates via Google Maps API and subsequent manual checking. For mines where no coordinates could be found, other geospatial attributes such as province, region, district or municipality were recorded, and linked to the GADM data set, available at www.gadm.org.

The data set consists of 12 tables. The table “facilities” contains descriptive and spatial information of mines and processing facilities, and is available as a GeoPackage (GPKG) file. All other tables are available in comma-separated values (CSV) format. A schematic depiction of the database is provided in the file database_model.png. A description of all variables of all tables is provided in the Excel file variables_descriptions.xlsx.