Tech Talk

GSWA Record 2025/6

08/09/2025 Posted by Helen

A Summary of GSWA Stratigraphic drilling in sedimentary basins, Western Australia

The Geological Survey of Western Australia (GSWA) routinely acquires new pre-competitive geoscience data to encourage exploration within Western Australia. Drilling in underexplored regions by this organisation aims to update stratigraphic and age relationships, and the prospectivity for many commodities. In Neoproterozoic–Phanerozoic sedimentary basins such drilling can reveal the existence of reservoir, seal and hydrocarbon source rocks, and can provide geothermal data to aid prospectivity assessments for petroleum (oil, hydrocarbon gas, helium, and hydrogen), coal, geothermal energy and CO2 sequestration.

The Renaissance Tour: A revival of frontier basins with data-driven exploration

02/09/2025 Posted by Helen

by Karyna Rodriguez, Neil Hodgson & Lauren Found

Presented at the Petroleum Exploration Society of Australia (WA Branch) Lunch Series, June 2025

Full article available here

As the energy exploration landscape evolves, so too does the thinking around the basins being investigated. Advancing seismic acquisition and processing technologies in the last decade have allowed for explorers to take a fresh look on frontier and previously discarded basins, with the shifts in thinking and interpretation yielding billions of barrels of results.

In this world tour, four deep-water basins are investigated, including the Papuan Basin of Papua New Guinea (PNG), the Scotian Basin of Canada, the Namibian-South African Orange Basin and its Brazilian conjugate margin in the Pelotas Basin.

Vp/Vs ratio conventional vs Web-AVO inversion

eFWI Using WEB-AVO at Delft Inversion

07/08/2025 Posted by Janny

By John Coffin

This year we have seen plenty of publicity and interest in elastic full waveform inversion, or eFWI and the potential benefits and advantages it can provide. At Delft Inversion we have been using eFWI for over 12 years focussing on quantitative interpretation and seismic reservoir characterisation. This article explains how and why we do this.

The eFWI technology developed at Delft Inversion is called WEB-AVO which stands for Wave Equation Based AVO inversion. So, what does this mean? We solve the integral representation of the wave equation.

New perspectives on the sequence stratigraphy of the Early-Middle Triassic of the Bedout Sub-basin

22/07/2025 Posted by Helen

Roisin McGee A* , George Mills A and Simon Sturrock B

- Author Affiliations - A Carnarvon Energy, Perth, WA, Australia. B Strat Trap, Perth, WA, Australia.

* Correspondence to: rmcgee@cvn.com.au

Australian Energy Producers Journal 65, EP24163 https://doi.org/10.1071/EP24163

Accepted: 29 March 2025 Published: 22 May 2025

© 2025 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of Australian Energy Producers. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)

The Bedout Sub-basin, part of the Roebuck Basin on Western Australia’s North West Shelf, has drawn interest since hydrocarbon discoveries at Roc, Dorado and Pavo. Despite these successes, the region remains underexplored.

Unlocking Subsurface Insights: The Power of Spectral Decomposition in Geoscience

11/06/2025 Posted by Helen

Spectral decomposition is a method that transforms seismic data into the frequency domain, revealing geological features that may not be visible in conventional seismic interpretation. This technique is widely used in hydrocarbon exploration, reservoir characterization, and geohazard identification.

It enhances thin bed detection, allowing geoscientists to resolve thin reservoirs and stratigraphic layers beyond conventional seismic resolution. The method can also serve as a direct hydrocarbon indicator, detecting frequency anomalies associated with hydrocarbons. Lastly, it supports lithology and facies mapping by differentiating rock types based on their spectral response, making it a valuable tool in subsurface exploration and reservoir studies.

The Mixer in Petrel allows users to compare and evaluate multiple seismic frequency volumes simultaneously using RGB/CMY blending.

deep crustal seismic studies Western Australia

Geological Survey of Western Australia’s Canning Basin and Perth Basin Deep Crustal Seismic Studies

09/05/2025 Posted by Helen

The Geological Survey of Western Australia (GSWA) will be soon releasing a report on seismic mapping of the southern Canning Basin authored by Y. Zhan and a plate showing seismic interpretation of the Perth Basin section of three new deep-crustal seismic lines which were acquired by GSWA in 2023-24 interpreted by C. Thomas.

The southeastern Canning Basin represents one of the least explored sedimentary regions in onshore Australia, largely due to its remoteness and challenging access conditions.

Natural Hydrogen in Western Australia

09/03/2025 Posted by Helen

Leon Normore, Geological Survey of Western Australia

Abstract

The nascent field of natural hydrogen investigations is expanding rapidly worldwide. Recent studies in Australia have documented hydrogen in natural gas samples in both sedimentary basins and cratonic settings, and discussed multiple abiogenic sources for natural Hydrogen (Boreham et al., 2021a,b).

Geoscience data management can help reduce subsurface uncertainty

12/02/2025 Posted by Helen

Author Neil Constantine

When modelling the subsurface as geoscientists and engineers, we work with multiple sources of data to ensure we best understand and mitigate any uncertainty. Raw data such as wells and seismic are key to improving our understanding of the subsurface, but we also rely on previous projects, interpretations and models to help fast track our knowledge. But what if these add to our uncertainty, with projects of unknown provenance requiring time to find, understand and review, and with mis-loaded or otherwise incorrect data negatively influencing our models?

Building on a career spent at the...

Geoscience workflows for CO2 storage

14/01/2025 Posted by Helen

A review and summary by Steve Moss

Geoenergy is a new journal co-owned between the Geological Society and the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE) that was established in 2023 (Geoenergy Home). The journal is dedicated to the publication of non-hydrocarbon energy geoscience and engineering research. In a similar fashion to its stable-mate journal, Petroleum Geoscience, Geoenergy focuses on the publication of timely and topical research in subsurface geoscience, critical for this new era of sustainable energy aiming to provide high quality papers of both fundamental research and case studies of subsurface and near surface analysis.

Surface interaction changes in minerals for underground hydrogen Storage: Effects of CO2 cushion gas

07/01/2025 Posted by Helen

by Hamid Esfandyari et al

This article was originally published in Renewable Energy 237 (2024) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2024.121726

Hydrogen (H2) offers a promising solution for the energy transition but storing it on a large scale at the surface poses significant technical and environmental challenges. Underground formations provide a practical alternative for large-scale H2 storage, yet understanding H2 behavior under various subsurface conditions is crucial for optimizing storage capacity and efficiency, which are influenced by rock properties such as wettability.