Chiefly charts and maps, includes explanatory notes

Promotional flyer comprising map showing petroleum exploration permits and current and proposed gazettal areas for acreage release. map is supplemented by short information (text) about geological aspects of release areas and summeries of Austrlaia's oil and gas production levels.

Petroleum Titles map Basin and Coastline data

Annual update of map backing the combined GA/RET NAPE Conference brochure.

No abstract available

The collection is derived from the submission of data under the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Act (OPGGSA) and previous legislation. The Petroleum (Submerged Lands) Act (and the Offshore Petroleum Act & OPGGSA) requires petroleum data to be submitted to the State Designated Authority (DA). These Acts also require the DA's to make copies of the data/samples available to the Commonwealth Minister through the Joint Authority. The collection also contains cores, cuttings, paper reports, logs and stratigraphic cores drilled by BMR and a limited collection of water bores and engineering cores from around Canberra.

The Australian Government formally releases new offshore exploration areas at the annual APPEA conference. The previous two releases were characterised by several large gazetted areas in underexplored regions, a trend that is maintained this year with several frontier areas in excess of 100 graticular blocks on offer. The uptake of new exploration permits in the Bight Basin, the offshore North Perth Basin and the Roebuck Basin indicates a continuing strong industry interest in offshore frontier exploration.

Map of permits currently held by Silver Wave Energy (AC/P49 to 51). Paper size A0.

The Australian Government, through the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, routinely funds Geoscience Australia to acquire pre-competitive data to support prospectivity assessments of various offshore basins. As part of the Australian Government's National CO2 Infrastructure Plan (Carbon Storage Taskforce 2009), a marine seismic reflection survey, Gippsland Basin Infill 2D Marine Seismic Survey - GA0352, was undertaken in the offshore southern margin of the Gippsland Basin to investigate potential sites suitable for CO2 geological storage (Langford, 2016).

The Onshore Energy Systems Group have undertaken a regional study on the prospectivity of the southern Georgina Basin, and present here a synopsis of the initial results from this multidisciplinary project. The Georgina Basin is a Neoproterozoic to Lower Devonian sedimentary basin covering 325,000 km2 of western Queensland and the Northern Territory (Dunster et al., 2007; Kruse et al., 2013; Munson, 2014). It is a northwest-southeast-trending extensional basin, where thick marine Cambrian and Ordovician sediments are preserved in its two southern depocentres, the Dulcie and Toko synclines, and a thinner succession is present in the Undilla Sub-basin to the northeast. Within these depocentres, the Thorntonia Limestone and Arthur Creek Formation (Figure 1) contain potential source rocks (Ambrose et al., 2001; Boreham and Ambrose, 2012). Most of the southern Georgina Basin is under license for petroleum exploration, with explorers targeting the carbonate-dominated Arthur Creek Formation for both conventional and unconventional hydrocarbons. A data package that includes raw and reprocessed HyLogging data from 25 wells in the Georgina Basin was recently released (Smith and Huntington, 2014). The HyLogging data map the mineralogical variations within formations and were used in conjunction with wireline log and biostratigraphic data to refine stratigraphic correlation. The HyLogging data were re-processed using a common set of mineral scalars (i.e., spectroscopic indices) to create an internally-consistent, basin-wide dataset. Other datasets, including total organic carbon (TOC) content, X-ray diffraction (XRD) measurements and biostratigraphy were also integrated with the Hylogging data. The 'hot shale' of the Arthur Creek Formation has a characteristic spectral response of decreasing albedo and an increased short wave infra-red (SWIR) aspectral response with increasing depth to the base of the Arthur Creek Formation (Figure 2), which both appear to correlate with increasing core total gamma and TOC. These inter-relationships may be used to better characterise and identify potential source rock units in the basin. Recent biostratigraphic work has highlighted an age discrepancy in the prospective organic-rich `hot shale in the base of the middle Cambrian Arthur Creek Formation (Figure 1). This unit is present in the two major southern depocentres, the Dulcie and Toko synclines, where it has previously been considered as correlative. Recent results, however, suggest that the basal 'hot shale' is either significantly younger in the Toko Syncline than in the Dulcie Syncline, or represents a condensed section in the former. Middle Cambrian carbon isotope excursions have been correlated across a number of Australian basins and can be used to test correlative models across the Georgina depocentres. High resolution sampling across this middle Cambrian section has been carried out in a number of wells in the Dulcie Syncline and in the Undilla Sub-basin, where the age equivalent Inca Shale is penetrated. Carbon isotopes from organic carbon (kerogen) as well as carbon and oxygen isotope ratios of four carbonate mineral phases (calcite, ankerite, dolomite and siderite) were analysed and these data are compared with existing carbon isotope stratigraphy published from neighboring wells (Donnelly et al., 1988; Lindsay et al., 2005; Creveling et al., 2013). Initial results corroborate the new biostratigraphic interpretation.