<div>Geochemical and mineralogical analysis of surficial materials (streams, soils, catchment samples, etc) can provide valuable information about the potential for mineral systems, and the background mineralogical and geochemical variation for a region. However, collecting new samples can be time consuming and expensive, particularly for regional-scale studies. Fortunately, Geoscience Australia has a large holding of archived samples from regional- to continental-scale geochemical studies conducted over the last 50 years, the majority collected at high sampling densities that would be cost-prohibitive today. Although all these samples have already been analysed, their vintage can mean that analyses were obtained by a variety of analytical methods, are of variable quality, and often only available for a small number of elements. As part of the Australian government’s Exploring for the Future program, funding was dedicated to re-analyse ~9,000 samples from these legacy surveys. They were re-analysed for 63 elements (total content) at a single laboratory producing a seamless, internally consistent, high-quality dataset, providing valuable new insights.</div><div><br></div><div>A large number (7,700) of these legacy samples were collected from north Queensland, predominantly in the Cape York – Georgetown area (5,472) — an area with both a wide-range of existing deposit types and known potential for many critical minerals. The sample densities of these studies, up to 1 sample per ~2.5 km2 for Georgetown, makes them directly applicable for determining local- and regional-scale areas of interest for mineral potential. Early interpretation of the Cape York – Georgetown data has identified several locations with stream sediments enriched in both heavy and light rare earth elements (maximum 4000 and 31,800 ppm, respectively), demonstrating the potential of this dataset, particularly for critical minerals. The greater sampling density means that these samples can also provide much more granular geochemical background information and contribute to our understanding of the lower density data commonly used in regional- and national-scale geochemical background studies.</div><div><br></div><div>In addition to the geochemical re-analysis of legacy surface samples, Geoscience Australia has also been undertaking mineral analysis of legacy continental-scale geochemical samples. The National Geochemical Survey of Australia (NGSA) sample archive has been utilised to provide a valuable new dataset. By separating and identifying heavy minerals (i.e., those with a specific gravity >2.9 g/cm3) new information about the mineral potential and provenance of samples can be gained. The Heavy Mineral Map of Australia (HMMA) project, undertaken in collaboration with Curtin University, has analysed the NGSA sample archive, with~81% coverage of the continent. The project has identified over 145 million individual mineral grains belonging to 163 unique mineral species. Preliminary analysis of the data has indicated that zinc minerals and native elements may be useful for mineral prospectivity. Due to the large amount of data generated as part of this HMMA project, a mineral network analysis tool has been developed to help visualise the relationship between minerals and aid in the interpretation of the data. Abstract presented to the Australian Institute of Geoscientists – ALS Friday Seminar Series: Geophysical and Geochemical Signatures of Queensland Mineral Deposits October 2023 (https://www.aig.org.au/events/aig-als-friday-seminar-series-geophysical-and-geochemical-signatures-of-qld-mineral-deposits/)

<div>Templates and User Guide to provide airborne geophysical data to non-technical people. The template includes a description of the project, survey method, how the data can be used, and what the data can show you. The template is internal use only</div><div>1. Airborne Electromagnetic Survey</div>

<div><strong>Output Type: </strong>Exploring for the Future Extended Abstract</div><div><br></div><div><strong>Short Abstract:</strong> Under the Exploring for the Future (EFTF) program, Geoscience Australia staff and collaborators engaged with land-connected stakeholders that managed or had an interest in land comprising 56% of the total land mass area of Australia. From 2020 to 2023, staff planning ground-based and airborne geophysical and geological data acquisition projects consulted farmers, National Park rangers and managers, Native Title holders, cultural heritage custodians and other land-connected people to obtain land access and cultural heritage clearances for surveys proposed on over 122,000 parcels of land. Engagement did not always result in field activities proceeding. To support communication with this diverse audience, animations, comic-style factsheets, and physical models, were created to help explain field techniques. While the tools created have been useful, the most effective method of communication was found to be a combination of these tools and open two-way discussions.</div><div><br></div><div><strong>Citation: </strong>Sweeney, M., Kuoni, J., Iffland, D. &amp; Soroka, L., 2024. Improving how we engage with land-connected people about geoscience. In: Czarnota, K. (ed.) Exploring for the Future: Extended Abstracts. Geoscience Australia, Canberra. https://doi.org/10.26186/148760</div>

<div>Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is gaining momentum globally. The Global CCS Institute notes in their Status of CCS 2023 report that there are 26 carbon capture and storage projects under construction and a further 325 projects in development, with a total capture capacity of 361 million tonnes per year (Mt/y) of carbon dioxide (CO2). Some CCS projects require the extraction of brackish or saline water (referred to here on in as brine) from the storage formation to manage increased pressure resulting from CO2 injection and/or to optimise subsurface storage space. It is important to consider the management of extracted brine as the CCS industry scales up due to implications for project design, cost and location as well as for the responsible management of the ‘waste’ or by-product brine. The use and disposal of reservoir brine has been investigated for CCS projects around the world, but not for Australian conditions. We have undertaken this review to explore how extracted brine could potentially be managed by CCS projects across Australia.&nbsp;</div>

<div>Geochemistry of soils, stream sediments, and overbank sediments, plays an important part in informing geochemical environmental baselines, mineral prospectivity, and environmental management practices. Australia has a large number of such surveys, but they are spatially isolated and often used in isolation. First released in 2020, the Levelled Geochemical Baseline of Australia focused on levelling such surveys across the North Australian Craton, so that they could be used as a seamless dataset. This data release acts as an update to the Levelled Geochemical Baseline of Australia by changing the focus to national scale and incorporating recently reanalysed legacy samples.</div><div><br></div><div>This work was undertaken as part of the Exploring for the Future program, an eight-year program by the Australian government. The 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 program, which commenced in 2016, was an eight year, $225m investment by the Australian Government.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div>

CO₂ enhanced oil recovery (CO₂-EOR) is a proven technology that can extend the life of oil fields, permanently store CO₂, and improve the recovery of oil and condensate over time. Although CO₂-EOR has been used successfully for decades, particularly in the United States, it has not gained traction in Australia to date. In this study, we assemble and evaluate data relevant to CO₂-EOR for Australia’s key oil and condensate producing basins, and develop a national-scale, integrated basin ranking that shows which regions have the best overall conditions for CO₂-EOR. The primary goals of our study are to determine whether Australia’s major hydrocarbon provinces exhibit suitable geological and oil characteristics for successful CO₂-EOR activities and to rank the potential of these basins for CO₂-EOR. Each basin is assessed based on the key parameters that contribute to a successful CO₂-EOR prospect: oil properties (API gravity), pressure, temperature, reservoir properties (porosity, permeability, heterogeneity), availability of CO₂ for EOR operations, and infrastructure to support EOR operations. The top three ranked basins are the onshore Bowen-Surat, Cooper-Eromanga and offshore Gippsland Basins, which are all in relatively close proximity to the large east coast energy/oil markets. A significant factor that differentiates these three basins from the others considered in this study is their relatively good access to CO₂ and well-developed infrastructure. The next three most suitable basins are located offshore on the Northwest Shelf (Browse, Carnarvon, and Bonaparte Basins). While these three basins have mostly favourable oil properties and reservoir conditions, the sparse CO₂ sources and large distances involved lead to lower scores overall. The Canning and Amadeus Basins rank the lowest among the basins assessed, being relatively immature and remote hydrocarbon provinces, and lacking the required volumes of CO₂ or infrastructure to economically implement CO₂-EOR. In addition to ranking the basins for successful implementation of CO₂-EOR, we also provide some quantification of the potential recoverable oil in the various basins. These estimates used the oil and condensate reserve numbers that are available from national databases combined with application of internationally observed tertiary recovery factors. Additionally, we estimate the potential mass of CO₂ that would be required to produce these potential recoverable oil and condensate resources. In the large oil- and condensate-bearing basins, such as the Carnarvon and Gippsland Basins, some scenarios require over a billion tonnes of CO₂ to unlock the full residual resource, which points to CO₂ being the limiting factor for full-scale CO₂-EOR development. Even taking a conservative view of the available resources and potential extent of CO₂-EOR implementation, sourcing sufficient amounts of CO₂ for large-scale deployment of the technology presents a significant challenge. <b>Citation:</b> Tenthorey, E., Kalinowski, A., Wintle, E., Bagheri, M., Easton, L., Mathews, E., McKenna, J., Taggart, I. 2022. Screening Australia’s Basins for CO2-Enhanced Oil Recovery (December 6, 2022). <i>Proceedings of the 16th Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies Conference (GHGT-16) 23-24 Oct 2022</i>, Available at SSRN: <a href="https://ssrn.com/abstract=4294743">https://ssrn.com/abstract=4294743</a> or <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4294743">http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4294743</a>

An Isotopic Atlas of Australia (Fraser et al., 2020) provides a convenient visual overview of age and isotopic patterns reflecting geological processes that have led to the current configuration of the Australian continent, including progressive development of continental crust from the mantle. This poster provides example maps produced from compiled data of multiple geochronology and isotopic tracer datasets from this Isotopic Atlas, now publicly available and downloadable via Geoscience Australia’s (GA) Exploring for the Future (EFTF) <a href="https://portal.ga.gov.au/persona/geochronology">Geochronology and Isotopes Data Portal</a> and Mineral Resources Tasmania’s <a href="https://www.mrt.tas.gov.au/mrt_maps/app/list/map">Listmap</a>. These datasets and maps unlock the collective value of several decades of geochronological and isotopic studies conducted across Australia. Compiled geochronology, which commenced with coverage of northern Australia (Jones et al., 2018), is now much more comprehensive across Victoria (Waltenberg et al., 2021) and Tasmania (Jones et al., in press), with New South Wales and South Australia updates well underway. Available data include: Sm–Nd model ages of magmatic rocks; Lu–Hf isotopes from zircon and associated O-isotope data; Pb–Pb isotopes from ore-related minerals such as galena and pyrite; Rb–Sr isotopes from soils; U–Pb ages of magmatic, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks; and K–Ar, Ar–Ar, Re–Os, Rb–Sr and fission-track ages from minerals and whole rocks. <b>To view the associated poster see <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.26186/147420">eCat 147420</a>. This Abstract & Poster were presented to the 2022 Specialist Group in Tectonics & Structural Geology(SGTSG) Conference 22-24 November (https://www.sgtsg.org/). </b> <i>Fraser, G.L., Waltenberg, K., Jones, S.L., Champion, D.C., Huston, D.L., Lewis, C.J., Bodorkos, S., Forster, M., Vasegh, D., Ware, B., Tessalina, S. 2020. An Isotopic Atlas of Australia. Geoscience Australia, Canberra. https://doi.org/10.11636/133772. Geoscience Australia. 2021. Geoscience Australia Exploring for the Future portal, viewed 13 September 2022. https://portal.ga.gov.au/persona/geochronology. Jones, S.L., Anderson, J.R., Fraser, G.L., Lewis, C.J., McLennan, S.M. 2018. A U-Pb Geochronology Compilation for Northern Australia: Version 2, 2018. Geoscience Australia Record 2018/49. https://doi.org/10.11636/Record.2018.049. Jones, S.L., Waltenberg, K., Ramesh, R., Cumming, G., Everard, J.L., Vicary, M.J., Bottrill, R.S., Knight, K., McNeill, A.W., Bodorkos, S., Meffre, S. in press. Isotopic Atlas of Australia: Geochronology compilation for Tasmania Version 1.0. Geoscience Australia Record. Mineral Resources Tasmania. 2022. Mineral Resources Tasmania Listmap, viewed 19 September 2022. https://www.mrt.tas.gov.au/mrt_maps/app/list/map. Waltenberg, K., Jones, S.L., Duncan, R.J., Waugh, S., Lane, J. 2021. Isotopic Atlas of Australia: Geochronology compilation for Victoria Version 1.0. Geoscience Australia Record 2021/24. https://doi.org/10.11636/Record.2021.024. </i>

<div>Although heavy mineral exploration techniques have been successfully used as exploration vectors to ore deposits around the world, exploration case studies and pre-competitive datasets relevant to Australian conditions are relatively limited. The Heavy Mineral Map of Australia (HMMA) project is a novel analytical campaign to determine the abundance and distribution of heavy minerals (SG>2.9 g/cc) in 1315 floodplain sediment samples collected from catchments across Australia during Geoscience Australia’s National Geochemical Survey of Australia (NGSA) project. Archived NGSA samples, which originated from, on average, 60 to 80 cm depth in floodplain landforms, were sub-sampled and subjected to dense media separation and automated SEM-EDS analysis in the John de Laeter Centre at Curtin University. Mineral assay data from all 1315 drainage samples will be publicly released by the end of 2023. </div><div><br></div><div>An initial data package released in August 2022 contains mineralogical assay data for 223 samples from the Darling–Curnamona–Delamerian (DCD) region of south-eastern Australia. That package identified over 140 heavy minerals from 29 million individual mineral observations. The number of mineral observations generated during the project required development of a novel Mineral Network Analysis (MNA) tool to allow end users to discover, visualise and interpret mineral co-occurrence relationships, potentially useful in exploration vectoring and targeting. The MNA tool can also be used to rapidly search the heavy mineral database to locate observations of potential economic significance. The co-occurrence of Zn-minerals indicative of high-grade metamorphism of base metal mineralisation (e.g., gahnite (Zn-spinel), ecandrewsite (Zn-ilmenite) and zincostaurolite (Zn-aluminosilicate)) from the region surrounding Broken Hill demonstrated the utility of the method. Zn-mineral co-occurrences not associated with known mineralisation were also noted and may represent targeting opportunities. </div><div><br></div><div>Heavy mineral data from parts of Queensland are scheduled for a separate public release in December 2022 and will be presented at the conference.&nbsp;</div> This Abstract was submitted/presented to the 2023 Australian Exploration Geoscience Conference 13-18 Mar (https://2023.aegc.com.au/)

<div>Historically, isotopic data are collected at the individual sample level on local- to regional-scale features and are dispersed among decades of both published and unpublished individual academic literature, university theses and geological survey reports, in disparate formats and with widely varying levels of detail. Consequently, it has been difficult to visualise or interrogate the collective value of age and isotopic data at continental-scale. Geoscience Australia’s (GA) continental-scale Isotopic Atlas of Australia (Fraser et al., 2020), breaks this cycle of single-use science by compiling and integrating <strong>multiple radiometric age and isotopic tracer datasets</strong> and making them publicly accessible and useable through GA’s Exploring for the Future (EFTF) Portal.</div><div><br></div><div>The first iteration of a continental-scale Isotopic Atlas of Australia was introduced by Geoscience Australia at the 2019 SGGMP conference in Devonport, Tasmania, through a talk and poster display. In the three years since, progress on this Isotopic Atlas has continued and expanded datasets are now publicly available and downloadable via Geoscience Australia’s Exploring for the Future (EFTF) Geochronology and Isotopes Data Portal.&nbsp;</div>

<div>A document outlining how geoscientific data can be useful for farmers and engagement tool for geoscientists interacting with farmers and pastoralists.</div>