Section B of International Standard Industrial Classifications of All Economic Activities (ISIC) Rev.4 includes the extraction of minerals occurring naturally as solids (coal and ores), liquids (petroleum) or gases (natural gas). Extraction can be achieved by different methods such as underground or surface mining, well operation, seabed mining etc.

This section also includes supplementary activities aimed at preparing the crude materials for marketing, for example, crushing, grinding, cleaning, drying, sorting, concentrating ores, liquefaction of natural gas and agglomeration of solid fuels. These operations are often carried out by the units that extracted the resource and/or others located nearby.

Mining activities are classified into divisions, groups and classes on the basis of the principal mineral produced. Divisions 05, 06 are concerned with mining and quarrying of fossil fuels (coal, lignite, petroleum, gas); divisions 07, 08 concern metal ores, various minerals and quarry products.
Some of the technical operations of this section, particularly related to the extraction of hydrocarbons, may also be carried out for third parties by specialized units as an industrial service, which is reflected in division 09.

This section excludes the processing of the extracted materials (see section C—Manufacturing), which also covers the bottling of natural spring and mineral waters at springs and wells (see class 1104) or the crushing, grinding or otherwise treating certain earths, rocks and minerals not carried out in conjunction with mining and quarrying (see #isic2399 - Manufacture of other non-metallic mineral products n.e.c.). This section also excludes the usage of the extracted materials without a further transformation for construction purposes (see section F—Construction), the collection, purification and distribution of water (see class 3600), separate site preparation activities for mining (see class 4312) and geophysical, geologic and seismic surveying activities (see class 7110).


The section includes these Divisions, Groups and Classes:



mining-and-quarrying