COALFILE Database

COALFILE documents a collection of 1029 Coal Assessment Reports, which describe exploration and development activity on coal dating from 1990. Many of the reports have been submitted by exploration companies in compliance with the Coal Act. Coal assessment reports have a confidential status for three years from the date of submission. Specific types of information are kept confidential indefinitely; described in detail in Section 2 of the Regulation. The collection also has an additional 196 reports of the Hat Creek area from BC Hydro and the Ministry Library. The information contained in COALFILE is stored as a relational database (MS Access) and includes spatial data for 15,539 boreholes, 546 bulk samples, 3645 trenches, over 5500 maps, and 1924 links to MINFILE. These data are available for download and viewing in MapPlace. All the off-confidential coal assessment reports are downloadable in .pdf with additional digital data as .zip files where available (borehole geophysics, borehole collar information, LiDAR). A search engine leads clients to a summary page for each coal exploration report which describes the data therein and links to the report and data files. The reports, boreholes, bulk samples, and trenches are spatially displayed on MapPlace.

Datasets available for download

• COALFILE2020 MS Access DatabaseZIP
  To Download

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• COALFILE ReportsCSV
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• COALFILE BoreholesCSV
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• COALFILE TrenchesCSV
  To Download

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• COALFILE BulksCSV
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• COALFILE Reports SHP formatSHP
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• COALFILE Reports Excel TableXLSX
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• COALFILE
• MINFILE
• assessment reports
• borehole
• bulk samples
• coal
• data
• maps
• trench

Additional Info

• Maturity Level 1 (46%)
• Maturity Level 2 (38%)
• Maturity Level 3 (0%)
• Maturity Level 4 (20%)
• Maturity Level 5 (0%)
• Maturity Level 6 (0%)

Field	Value
Last Updated	October 19, 2025, 23:25 (UTC)
Created	October 19, 2025, 23:25 (UTC)
Domain / Topic Domain or topic of the dataset being cataloged.
Title Title for the Dataset.	COALFILE Database
Description A description of the dataset.	COALFILE documents a collection of 1029 Coal Assessment Reports, which describe exploration and development activity on coal dating from 1990. Many of the reports have been submitted by exploration companies in compliance with the Coal Act. Coal assessment reports have a confidential status for three years from the date of submission. Specific types of information are kept confidential indefinitely; described in detail in Section 2 of the Regulation. The collection also has an additional 196 reports of the Hat Creek area from BC Hydro and the Ministry Library. The information contained in COALFILE is stored as a relational database (MS Access) and includes spatial data for 15,539 boreholes, 546 bulk samples, 3645 trenches, over 5500 maps, and 1924 links to MINFILE. These data are available for download and viewing in MapPlace. All the off-confidential coal assessment reports are downloadable in .pdf with additional digital data as .zip files where available (borehole geophysics, borehole collar information, LiDAR). A search engine leads clients to a summary page for each coal exploration report which describes the data therein and links to the report and data files. The reports, boreholes, bulk samples, and trenches are spatially displayed on MapPlace.
Tags / Keywords Keywords/tags categorizing the dataset.	COALFILE MINFILE assessment reports borehole bulk samples coal data maps trench
Format (CSV, XLS, TXT, PDF, etc) File format of the dataset.
Dataset Size Dataset size in megabytes.
Metadata Identifier Metadata identifier – can be used as the unique identifier for catalogue entry
Published Date Published date of the dataset.	2015-08-14
Time Period Data Span (start date) Start date of the data in the dataset.
Time Period Data Span (end date) End date of time data in the dataset.
GeoSpatial Area Data Span A spatial region or named place the dataset covers.

Field	Value
Access category Type of access granted for the dataset (open, closed, service, etc).
License License used to access the dataset.	Access Only
Limits on use Limits on use of data.
Location Location of the dataset.	https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/coalfile-database
Data Service Data service for accessing a dataset.
Owner Owner of the dataset.	BC Geological Survey
Contact Point Who to contact regarding access?	Yao Cui
Contact Point Email The email to contact regarding access?	[email protected]
Publisher Publisher of the dataset.
Publisher Email Email of the publisher.
Author Author of the dataset.
Author Email Email of the author.
Accessed At Date the data and metadata was accessed.

Field	Value
Identifier Unique identifier for the dataset.
Language Language(s) of the dataset
Link to dataset description A URL to an external document describing the dataset.
Persistent Identifier Data is identified by a persistent identifier.
Globally Unique Identifier Data is identified by a persistent and globally unique identifier.
Contains data about individuals Does the data hold data about individuals?
Contains data about identifiable individuals Does the data hold identifiable data about individual?
Contains Indigenous Data Does the data hold data about Indigenous communities?
Portal Type Platform type of the source portal.

Field	Value
Version Version of the datatset	None
Source Source of the dataset.	https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/coalfile-search
Version notes Version notes about the dataset.
Is version of another dataset Link to dataset that it is a version of.
Other versions Link to datasets that are versions of it.
Provenance Text Provenance Text of the data.	COALFILE began in 1978 as a collection of data from coal assessment reports into a database housed on an IBM Mainframe. In 1992, COALFILE was exported from the IBM Mainframe to the PC as 5 dBASE tables. Since 2003, the database is managed in MS Access.
Provenance URL Provenance URL of the data.
Temporal resolution Describes how granular the date/time data in the dataset is.
GeoSpatial resolution in meters Describes how granular (in meters) geospatial data is in the dataset.
GeoSpatial resolution (in regions) Describes how granular (in regions) geospatial data is in the dataset.

Field	Value
Indigenous Community Permission Who holds the Indigenous Community Permission. Who to contact regarding access to a dataset that has data about Indigenous communities.
Community Permission Community permission (who gave permission).
The Indigenous communities the dataset is about Indigenous communities from which data is derived.

Field	Value
Number of data rows If tabular dataset, total number of rows.
Number of data columns If tabular dataset, total number of unique columns.
Number of data cells If tabular dataset, total number of cells with data.
Number of data relations If RDF dataset, total number of triples.
Number of entities If RDF dataset, total number of entities.
Number of data properties If RDF dataset, total number of unique properties used by the triples.
Data quality Describes the quality of the data in the dataset.
Metric for data quality A metric used to measure the quality of the data, such as missing values or invalid formats.

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