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Bringing transparency to extractives payments

Welcome to ResourceProjects.org, the only open data portal for project-level payment data, from the Natural Resource Governance Institute.

What

On ResourceProjects.org, you'll find data on how much companies in the petroleum and mining sectors are paying to governments around the globe.

Starting in 2013, laws in Canada, the European Union, Norway, the United Kingdom and Switzerland have required publicly-listed and large private companies in the petroleum and mining sectors to disclose the amounts they pay to governments everywhere they operate. The United States also has a similar law in place, but implementation has not yet begun.

Since companies first began reporting in 2015, the Natural Resource Governance Institute has been collecting, cleaning and standardizing the disclosures made by hundreds of companies every year and publishing that data here on ResourceProjects.org. In 2021 we temporarily paused the data collection process, and the pause is still instated. As a result, the most recent year of data available is 2020. For more information please reach out to us via the email below. 

Why

Governments generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue from the extractive sector every year. However, these revenues have not historically been transparent and do not always benefit citizens of resource rich countries due to mismanagement or corruption. Mandatory payment disclosure laws changed that and have put valuable data into public hands often for the first time, in order to improve accountability and deter corruption.

Payments to governments disclosures must be made annually and at the project level for all payments over USD 100,000. This means that companies must attribute the amount they pay to governments to specific projects, such as a mine or an oil block. Payments are further disaggregated by payment type, like taxes, royalties, fees or production entitlements. Alongside the project-level disclosures, companies also report the specific government bodies they make payments to, at national, regional and local levels.

How

With over 700 companies reporting each year in 25 jurisdictions, the data collection for ResourceProjects.org is a year-round process.

First, we find and backup every report disclosed by companies as soon as they are published (this ensures we have a permanent record in case the reports disappear or are moved). Then we scrape the payment data, from PDFs, CSVs and web pages, into a standard format. To clean the data, we standardize project and government names that are disclosed differently across companies and years and convert all payment values to USD, keeping track of the changes we make along the way. Finally, all data is posted in open data format here, on ResourceProjects.org.

Until 2021, data was published usually within days of the reports first being published. However, please note that the most recent year of data currently available on the website is 2020 (for companies that reported in early 2021), because in mid-2021 we temporarily paused the data collection process. For more information please contact us via the email below. 

Who

The Natural Resource Governance Institute is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to improving development outcomes in resource rich countries.

If you are interested in the ResourceProjects.org initiative or have any questions or comments, please reach out to us via email at admin@resourcegovernance.org.