Drilling Data

Well completion and other company reports

PIRSA Petroleum and Geothermal Group has a library of hardcopy well completion reports of all petroleum wells drilled in South Australia, of which there are about 1750. To date, all well completion reports, selected geological reports and historical and current tenement register documents have been scanned, totaling over 28 GB. All documents are available on CD or DVD. Thousands of well log sepias and hardcopy well completion reports have now been processed and sentenced to State Records, completing two major long-term data management projects in 2004. Work is ongoing to sentence other petroleum reports and files to State Records, after scanning and digital archiving.

The formats of the scanned reports are as follows — the text of a report is in Adobe PDF format, including bookmarking for ease of navigation through the digital document. Larger plans and logs are captured as either TIFF or JPEG (colour) format and linked to the bookmarked document. These large images have not been embedded in the PDF to give companies more flexibility, including plotting or viewing the images in other software packages or the UNIX environment. Scanned well completion reports in this format can be found on recent PIRSA data and acreage release CDs and DVDs.

Digital well logs and well log displays (paper prints)

This digital well log database, includes field and edit tapes for open hole logs, measurement while drilling and cased hole logs, as well as higher resolution data including dipmeter, formation microscanner, array sonic, cement bond log, segmented bond tool and vertical seismic profile. Basic log data continues to be archived to CD and DVD, exceeding 65 GB to date. Digital data are available as basic validated data as originally supplied (EDIT or FIELD processing) or data digitised from an analogue source.

All data are sold in the format that was originally supplied. Pre-1999 data are available in LIS format only; post 1999 data are predominantly DLIS format.

All data orders now come with scanned images of the paper prints. Recent log displays may be in PDS (Schlumberger), META (Baker Atlas), TIFF or PDF formats.

The cost of basic log data is derived from the cost of transfer — eg a special CD containing well logs in LIS format for over 350 South Australian wells (mainly Cooper–Eromanga) costs A$100. Free quotes are provided for specialised orders.

Around 30 scanned well completion reports will fit on a single CD, but file sizes are reducing as tenement operators now submit them in digital format. PIRSA will provide quotes on application for scanned reports; as a guide a full DVD currently costs A$250.

Bundled packages

Petroleum and Geothermal Group are currently offering all open file well completion reports, wireline logs, log displays and a copy of PEPS-SA on a removable hard disk for A$2000.
 
The portable hard disk is provided free but with a caveat emptor — data is provided at cost of transfer but recipient must take responsibility to archive/backup the data in some manner of form. Portable disks are transport mediums (data can be deleted off them).

Core photos

Petroleum and Geothermal Group has scanned all petroleum core photographs and 3360 full size digital images (~1500 pixels by 1000 pixels by 256 colours) have been captured.

Thin sections

Petroleum and Geothermal Group is the custodian of over 6000 thin sections, prepared over the last 20 years for various basin studies. All thin sections have been catalogued in the PEPS database and are available for loan. Over 5500 sections have been scanned in normal and polarised light using specialised software and a scanner attached to a petrological microscope. These digital thin section images have been compiled into a searchable database and are available on a CD as a comprehensive atlas of key reservoirs and seals from South Australia’s petroleum prospective basins.

The system involves a petrographic microscope linked to a computer with a thin section digital image processing program that offers special application modules such as high resolution image archiving and measurement of grain and pore space sizes. The program can easily export data to Microsoft Windows applications such as Excel. This has already been used by PIRSA for a study of carbonate reservoirs in the Stansbury Basin, compilation of the Warburton Basin Atlas and the Cooper–Eromanga secondary migration study.