The Challenge
The exploration for, and management of, Australia’s mineral, energy, and water resources is challenged by the deep and complex surficial cover present across 80% of the country. The science of Deep Earth Imaging (DEI) is helping to more precisely image, conceptualise, and predict subsurface rock properties in a bid to unlock the resource potential of this vast and relatively under-explored area. Taking a high-risk, high-reward approach to its research activities, DEI has developed an array of new and powerful technologies and workflows based on interdisciplinary data analytics and inversion approaches that are transforming and improving our ability to understand and predict subsurface characteristics and processes. These tools have great potential to inform exploration strategies and reduce exploration risk, as well as improve the management of the nation’s natural resources.
Our Approach
CSIRO’s Deep Earth Imaging Future Science Platform has addressed high-risk, high-reward research challenges to help discover and manage our minerals, energy and water resources by developing new and powerful subsurface imaging and modelling technologies. Our methods are founded on interdisciplinary data analytics and inversion strategies, providing improved subsurface understanding from sparse, incomplete, and noisy data, using quantitative approaches that recognise the inherent uncertainties in geoscience data.
In energy exploration, Deep Earth Imaging has focused on the development of techniques for joint modelling of passive seismic and magnetotelluric data, interface imaging from potential field data, and full waveform inversion augmented by rock physics knowledge. These improved imaging techniques allow the quantification of model uncertainty, which leads to better-informed decisions relating to energy storage and exploration. Research investigations range from the micro to continental scale.
In minerals exploration, the focus of Deep Earth Imaging has been the development of geophysical and analytical tools to underpin more probabilistic-based area selection. This work builds upon the simulation of mineral systems; how fluids move through basins and along faults and fractures; improved imaging of interfaces, and the exploration of methods to infer processes from geophysical expressions.
In contrast with energy and mineral resources, new water resources not only need to be discovered, they also require management so that existing or planned use does not compromise future economic, social and environmental use. Deep Earth Imaging has developed quantitative methods, to explore and manage sustainable groundwater use.
Read more on our research to learn how we have tackled these challenges.
The Impact
Over seven years the DEI FSP has generated a range of outputs that have been transitioned into CSIRO, including 2 patents, 4 provisional patents, 22 algorithms, 12 workflows, 14 successful proof-of-concept studies, and the establishment of the InLab research centre, in partnership with ANU. DEI has convened 2 specialised conferences and 18 workshops attracting national and international participation; published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers; and, presented at more than 125 conferences. Impact has been recognised across industry, academia, and government sectors, and has largely focused on CSIRO’s Sustainable Energy and Resources Challenge. Examples of impact include, InLab, which has launched 2 products, Espresso (Earth Science Problems for the Evaluation of Strategies, Solvers and Optimizers) and CoFI (a Common Framework for Inference). These tools, freely accessible to all at no cost, are being used to help develop the next generation of inference methods for the resources sector, and for training by the geoscience community. Another is the commercialised Rock Physics Machine Learning Toolkit (RPML) is software that reliably estimates physical rock properties at depth. The resulting improved subsurface characterisation enables better energy resource extraction and the identification of suitable places for energy storage and carbon sequestration (to facilitate the clean energy transition), while also helping groundwater and mineral resource exploration.
Work with us
The work of the DEI FSP will continue, having been transitioned into the organisation’s business units. Are you interested in working with us? We continually seek opportunities to work collaboratively or to understand how we can address your needs in Deep Earth Imaging.
Contact us to find out how we can help,