Growing our capability with ongoing scanning and new instruments.
Funding has been secured for a HyLogger™ 4 and Raman spectroscopy unit at the South Australia Drill Core Reference Library to replace the current HyLogger™ 3. These new technologies will introduce the mid-infrared range, providing a continuous spectrum from 380 to 15,500 nm. Both instruments are an amazing addition to our geoscience capabilities.
Excitingly, the mid-infrared can be used to classify organic materials, opening up this non-destructive technique to the oil and gas industry for the first time. The mid-infrared range is routinely used to help identify minerals not recognised in the other spectral regions. The HyLogger 4 also brings a large increase in core tray imagery resolution (25 μm pixels) allowing analysis of textural information and detailed mineral relationships.
The Raman spectroscopy unit has a continuous scanning mode that will fit into the workflow as a secondary source of non-destructive mineral analysis. It comes with a reference library of over 5,000 minerals.
HyLogger data additions – second quarter 2021
Over 2,600 m of drill core and cuttings have undergone hyperspectral scanning in the second quarter or 2021 including (Fig 1):
- the Black Hill prospect in the Delamerian Orogen (exploring the prospectivity of the basement underneath the Murray Basin and complementing the current Delamerian National Drilling Initiative)
- the Bute prospect (with implications for sedimentary copper and complementing the current Geological Survey of South Australia – CSIRO project on sedimentary copper perspectivity)
- gold and base metal prospects around Keith in the South East
- historical drillholes to the north of Port Broughton in the Moonta Wallaroo region (testing copper prospectivity)
- co-funded PACE drillholes from the Eyre Peninsula.
To view and download the latest spectral geoscience data visit either:
Figure 1 SARIG screenshot showing HyLogger drillholes released in the second quarter of 2021.
– Georgina Gordon, June 2021
