The Department is the custodian for an extensive library of cuttings, core, core photographs and thin-sections from the approximately 3300 petroleum and geothermal wells that have been drilled in South Australia. The core and cuttings are stored at the Department’s state-of-the-art Core Library at Tonsley and can be inspected on-site by prior arrangement (access the booking form). The sampling of core and/or cuttings is also permitted, subject to the sampling restriction guidelines.
The Department’s database of ~6,000 thin sections generated from core, cuttings and relevant outcrops around South Australia are stored at Tonsley and are available on loan.
New virtual petroleum and geothermal ‘Core library’
The Cores module of the PEPS South Australia database was released in April 2021 and provides comprehensive details of 2,400 cored intervals and 16,000 core photographs from petroleum and geothermal wells drilled in South Australia. It totals ~41 GB of data and offers users the ability to interact with and download individual photographs or all photographs from a selected well (in a zip file). Requests for the entire open-file database of core photography can be made via DEM.petroleum@sa.gov.au. Charges are levied for this service to cover staff time and the cost of media and shipping.
Images have been sourced from old well completion reports which were scanned by the Energy Resources Division in the 1990s as part of the SAEI and TEISA initiatives, as well as modern digital well completion reports, and department geologists who have photographed core during their research projects. The best quality images available have been used. This database module aims to assist local, national and international researchers plan their core layouts and sampling campaigns, enables virtual studies of cores when travel is restricted and forms a valuable addition to the PEPS database.
Screenshot showing the core module and core photographs
Thin section database
Over 5,800 thin sections have been scanned and the images compiled into a database available for free download as a 730 MB zipped executable file.
Please note – you first need to install Legacy PEPS-SA database to be able to access the Thin Section images.
