Geoscience Australia’s Exploring for the Future program provides precompetitive information to inform decision-making by government, community and industry on the sustainable development of Australia's mineral, energy and groundwater resources. By gathering, analysing and interpreting new and existing precompetitive geoscience data and knowledge, we are building a national picture of Australia’s geology and resource potential. This leads to a strong economy, resilient society and sustainable environment for the benefit of all Australians. This includes supporting Australia’s transition to net zero emissions, strong, sustainable resources and agriculture sectors, and economic opportunities and social benefits for Australia’s regional and remote communities. The Exploring for the Future (EFTF) program, which commenced in 2016, is an eight year, $225m investment by the Australian Government.
As part of the EFTF Program, Geoscience has completed a multi-disciplinary study to investigate the energy resource potential of selected onshore basins within central Australia under the Australia’s Future Energy Resources (AFER) Project. The AFER Project has adapted the conventional hydrocarbon play-based exploration workflow, developed by the petroleum industry over several decades, to develop a similar approach for assessing unconventional hydrocarbon resource potential and CO2 geological storage prospectivity. Play-based exploration is a method of building and leveraging an understanding of a basin and its sediment-hosted resources by systematically evaluating a series of play intervals using the best available geological data and models. Each play interval represents a regionally significant reservoir/aquifer for one or more resources (e.g. hydrocarbons, groundwater, CO2 storage intervals) often with an associated seal/aquitard. Various ‘risk elements’ that are essential for a resource to exist can be mapped and qualified with a probability of geological success. These risk elements are then spatially integrated (stacked) to generate common risk segment (CRS) or ‘heat’ maps for each play interval that indicate areas of relatively high prospectivity versus relatively low prospectivity. Geological risk elements are evaluated using post-drill analysis of well control points, and geological maps generated from basin studies.
Common risk segment mapping, supported by post-drill analysis, has been undertaken by the AFER Project using the GIS-Pax Player Software, and assigned a geological probability of success (POS) using a ‘split risking’ system that involves assessing:
· Pg play, which is the POS that the risk element is effective somewhere within the map segment;
· Pg repeatability, which is the POS of future repeated effective discoveries for the risk element within the map segment (i.e. the inherent variability or heterogeneity of the risk element); and the
· Pg overall (Pg play x Pg repeatability).
This data package provides a spatial data set (CRS maps and post-drill analysis) capturing the AFER project’s assessment of hydrocarbon resources (conventional hydrocarbons, coal seam gas, and shale hydrocarbons) and the CO2 geological storage potential of the Pedirka and western Eromanga basins. The data package includes the following data sets:
1. Common risk segment maps for conventional hydrocarbons, unconventional hydrocarbons and CO2 geological storage resources provided in ESRI© ArcGIS file geodatabase format (gdb).
2. Common risk segment maps for conventional hydrocarbons, unconventional hydrocarbons and CO2 geological storage resources provided in ESRI© shape format (shp).
3. Post-drill analysis data provided in ESRI© shape format (shp).
4. Metadata forms documenting key information (abstract, data sources, lineage for related groups of map layers, keywords) for each group of related CRS maps and for the post-drill analysis results.
The product authors wish to acknowledge Tehani Palu (Geoscience Australia) for her internal peer review of the digital data package, Darren Ferdinando (Basin Science Pty Ltd) for his review of the conventional hydrocarbon common risk segment mapping, and Catherine Flowers (Geoscience Australia) for her technical support in developing the GIS products.
