Under the Petroleum and Geothermal Energy Act, licence-holders must submit to the Department copies of both field (raw) and processed data for all seismic surveys acquired or reprocessed in South Australia. Acquisition reports, processing reports and ancillary field data (e.g. observer’s logs) must also be supplied. The seismic data and the ancillary data are published 2 years after the acquisition or reprocessing of the survey and are made available to stakeholders via the Department’s online portal SARIG or on request from DEM.petroleum@sa.gov.au.
The Department’s current holdings contain approximately 80 Tb of data, consisting of:
- Field and processed data (plus associated reports) from 93 onshore 3D surveys
- Processed data for 2 offshore 3D surveys
- 13,843 2D lines (approximately 314,000 line-km of 2D data) within South Australia. Including data for lines from surveys which straddle the State’s borders, these numbers increase to 16,914 lines and 365,000 line-km.
The acquisition of onshore 3D seismic data has been limited to the Cooper-Eromanga and Otway basins but the 2D database includes lines from all of the significant prospective and producing basins in South Australia. All of the field and processed seismic data are held digitally on hard-drive following a tape transcription project that was completed in 2019 and the Department also holds data from approximately 48,000 upholes plus various vertical seismic profiles (VSP’s).
The seismic data for which the Department is responsible includes marine surveys acquired prior to 2012, when responsibility for offshore petroleum exploration passed to the Commonwealth and is administered under the Offshore Petroleum & Greenhouse Gas Storage Act. See the Offshore Seismic Data page for more information.
