Geoscience Australia, through its Exploring the Future program, has created an atlas of sites across the nation that may contain previously overlooked critical minerals - including those used to produce electric vehicles and solar panels.

The atlas is a collaboration with RMIT University, the University of Queensland and the geological surveys of Queensland, New South Wales, Northern Territory, Victoria and South Australia.

Federal resources minister Madeleine King said the Atlas of Australian Mine Waste could provide industry with additional opportunities to extract valuable resources from previously mined rock and earth.

"Some of the minerals we need now, and into the future, may not just be in the ground - they're also in rock piles and tailings on mines sites around the country," King said.

"These minerals might not have been of interest when first extracted but could now be in hot demand as the world seeks to decarbonise - for example, cobalt in the tailings of old copper mines.

"This new Atlas puts these potentially lucrative sites on the map for the first time and may open up new sources of critical minerals."

King said so far the atlas had identified 1050 sites across Australia as possible sources of critical minerals.

"Reprocessing rocks and earth that have been previously excavated during mining operations can give new life to old mining towns, create jobs and rejuvenate local economies," she said.

The Minerals Research Institute of Western Australia is conducting similar research.

MRIWA chief executive officer Nicole Roocke said the institute was considering the type of exploration effort needed to determine what was in some of WA's legacy tailings storage facilities.

That will aim to determine the prospectivity of those facilities as well as the contaminants they contain and use that information to build a database so people could access it to look at TSFs the way they look at Geoscience WA's database.