Product catalogue
A landform sub-circular depression study in western NSW
<div>Exploring for the Future (EFTF) is an Australian Government program led by Geoscience Australia, in partnership with state and Northern Territory governments. EFTF program (2016-2024) aims to drive industry investment in resource exploration in frontier regions of northern Australia by providing new precompetitive data and information about energy, mineral and groundwater resource potential.
In order to address this overarching objective of EFTF program, Geoscience Australia led a key element of the Australian Government’s commitment to achieve net zero by 2050 is the adoption of hydrogen (H2) energy. The key benefit of using H2 is that it is a clean fuel, emitting only water vapour and heat when combusted. The recent discovery of a 98% pure geologic H2 gas field in Mali has captured the imagination of explorers and the search is now on for new natural H2 gas accumulations across the world. Australia is considered one of the most prospective locations for sub-surface natural H2 due to our ancient geology and presence of potentially suitable H2 traps. A review of occurrences of natural (or geologic) H2 found high concentrations of H2 gas present in central western, New South Wales (NSW). This project, in collaboration with the Geological Survey of NSW, builds on that early work and presents the results identifying new occurrences of natural H2 through soil gas surveys in various locations across central and far west, NSW.
Funded through the EFTF Strategic Innovation Reserve Fund (SIRF), FrontierSI was commissioned to identify circular to sub-circular morphologies, sometimes called Fairy Circles, across parts of far west, NSW as potential locations for naturally occurring hydrogen gas deposits. This report briefly introduces hydrogen gas exploration, and its importance to Australia's future energy mix, outlines the methods used to identify circular morphologies, the results, discussion, and recommendations for future work.
Specifically, currently available literature was reviewed that describes the observable features believed to be related to natural hydrogen seeps, the previous methods used as well as the variety of datasets previously explored. The aim was to utilise open-source data and earth observation datasets where possible, and work towards an automated detection method. The Digital Earth Australia (DEA) Water Observation dataset was found to include many of the known hydrogen related features in Western Australia and was used as a foundation for creating an identification methodology. A modified version of the water observation layer was used along with other datasets including vegetation cover, which was applied to help refine and remove features that did not meet the set criteria for naturally occurring hydrogen deposits. This resulted in the production of two datasets over the two areas of interest, identified by Geoscience Australia at the beginning of the project, and used by their teams for site selection.
Simple
Identification info
- Date (Creation)
- 2023-06-16T12:00:00
- Date (Publication)
- 2024-06-20T00:10:31
- Citation identifier
- Geoscience Australia Persistent Identifier/https://pid.geoscience.gov.au/dataset/ga/148546
- Citation identifier
- Digital Object Identifier/https://dx.doi.org/10.26186/148546
- Cited responsible party
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Role Organisation / Individual Name Details Publisher Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)
Voice Author Fisk, C.
External Contact Author Boreham, C.
Internal Contact Author Czado, K.
External Contact Author Black, E.
Internal Contact Author Seehaber, M.
External Contact Author Kennedy, G.
External Contact Author Yuan, F.
External Contact
- Purpose
-
Report by Frontier SI and commissioned under the EFTF program to identification potential natural hydrogen gas leakage sites across far west NSW. These hydrogen gas leakage sites can generally be characterised by the absence of vegetation within sub-circular depressions (SCDs) on the land surface. Identification of these SCDs aided in the prioritisation of site locations in field sampling surveys where hydrogen gas was measured in soil gases collected within the near surface.
- Status
- Completed
- Point of contact
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Role Organisation / Individual Name Details Resource provider Minerals, Energy and Groundwater Division
External Contact Point of contact Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)
Voice Point of contact Boreham, C.
Internal Contact
- Spatial representation type
- Topic category
-
- Geoscientific information
Extent
))
- Maintenance and update frequency
- As needed
Resource format
- Title
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Product data repository: Various Formats
- Website
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Data Store directory containing the digital product files
Data Store directory containing one or more files, possibly in a variety of formats, accessible to Geoscience Australia staff only for internal purposes
- Project
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EFTF – Exploring for the Future
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- Project
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Strategic Innovation Reserve Fund (SIRF)
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- Keywords
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Natural hydrogen
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- Keywords
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Gas seepage
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- Keywords
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Remote Sensing
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- Keywords
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Sub-circular depressions
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- theme.ANZRC Fields of Research.rdf
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EARTH SCIENCES
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- Keywords
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Published_External
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Resource constraints
- Title
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence
- Alternate title
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CC-BY
- Edition
-
4.0
- Access constraints
- License
- Use constraints
- License
- Other constraints
-
(c) Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia) 2024
Resource constraints
- Title
-
Australian Government Security Classification System
- Edition date
- 2018-11-01T00:00:00
- Classification
- Unclassified
- Classification system
-
Australian Government Security Classification System
- Language
- English
- Character encoding
- UTF8
Distribution Information
- Distributor contact
-
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details Distributor Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)
Voice facsimile
- OnLine resource
-
Download Report (docx) [9.2 MB]
Download Report (docx) [9.2 MB]
- Distribution format
-
-
docx
- File decompression technique
-
nil
-
- OnLine resource
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Download Trip 1A (zip) [385.2 KB]
Download Trip 1A (zip) [385.2 KB]
- Distribution format
-
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zip
- File decompression technique
-
unzip
-
- OnLine resource
-
Download Trip 2A (zip) [2.1 MB]
Download Trip 2A (zip) [2.1 MB]
- Distribution format
-
-
zip
- File decompression technique
-
unzip
-
Resource lineage
- Statement
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<div>Under the EFTF program and supported by the SIRF project, This report was prepared for Geoscience Australia’s by Frontier SI.</div>
Metadata constraints
- Title
-
Australian Government Security Classification System
- Edition date
- 2018-11-01T00:00:00
- Classification
- Unclassified
Metadata
- Metadata identifier
-
urn:uuid/490d4810-126f-4044-ac84-6346d8c2608c
- Title
-
GeoNetwork UUID
- Language
- English
- Character encoding
- UTF8
- Contact
-
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details Point of contact Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)
Voice Point of contact Boreham, C.
Internal Contact
Type of resource
- Resource scope
- Document
- Name
-
Third-Party Report
Alternative metadata reference
- Title
-
Geoscience Australia - short identifier for metadata record with
uuid
- Citation identifier
- eCatId/148546
- Date info (Creation)
- 2024-06-12T04:21:28
- Date info (Revision)
- 2024-06-12T04:21:28
Metadata standard
- Title
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AU/NZS ISO 19115-1:2014
Metadata standard
- Title
-
ISO 19115-1:2014
Metadata standard
- Title
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ISO 19115-3
- Title
-
Geoscience Australia Community Metadata Profile of ISO 19115-1:2014
- Edition
-
Version 2.0, September 2018
- Citation identifier
- http://pid.geoscience.gov.au/dataset/ga/122551