Feeling the heat at the pump? Geoscience Australia puts petroleum back on the map
Feeling the heat at the pump? Geoscience Australia puts petroleum back on the map
Month Date, 2007: While it may not have impacted petrol prices just yet, a data remastering project by SpectrumData for Geoscience Australia has transformed 750 terabytes of seismic data to combat legacy formats and free access to exploration information. It’s the largest data migration project ever undertaken in Australia and one which looks set to now ensure continued access to data of national significance.
Staff at the Federal Government Department, Geoscience Australia are finding a little more shelf space in their data repositories. After undertaking a data remastering project with SpectrumData, they’ve managed to clear much of the 7km of shelving that once housed the lifeblood of petroleum exploration and drilling across the country.
But it’s not just freeing up valuable real estate. For the exploration industry, it’s providing a valuable link between petroleum companies, allowing them to reduce the ‘cost of transfer.’ “Large multi-national companies now carry out work programs in Australia due to Geoscience Australia’s ability to provide data that may be used for both interpretation and reprocessing,” says Paula Cronin, manager of Geological and Geophysical Data Repositories at Geoscience Australia. In an average month, such data usually filters through to at least 15 major petroleum companies.
The Data held in the Data repository is one of the world’s largest collections. Being one of the few countries with legislation actually requiring submission of and access to petroleum data, the collection’s access and maintenance is vital. Coincidently, the price of petrol per barrel also jumped around the same time the project commenced, which quickly made the data even more precious as petroleum companies began the hunt to find new resources.
A total of $25 million was allocated for the remastering project, much of which came out of the 2003 Federal Budget. With 500,000 tapes of older seismic survey data need of revitalisation, Geoscience Australia estimated $10 million of the funding would be required to transfer the information on to high density media (3590B cartridges.) The remaining $15 million was allocated for the collection of new, industry standard seismic and physical sample data.
When faced with the challenge of preserving the exploration data that extends as far back as 1960, Geoscience Australia selected SpectrumData to undertake the majority of the re-mastering work. The project required the recovery, transcription and duplication of the data stored across 20 different seismic formats and with experience in similar projects across the globe, the Perth-based company proved a good fit. SpectrumData says the majority of the tapes suffered from common deterioration problems, stiction and other general damage from normal wear and tear.
Overall, it’s the condition of the data that’s important to ensure it’s accessibility and survival. With 355,00 9 track tapes remastered, 12 percent were classified as ‘bad’ and dependant on media brand while 30 percent were classified as ‘marginal’ and likely to go bad dependant on the media brand. SpectrumData says now they’ve remastered the majority of the tapes, 99 percent of all bad and marginal condition data was recovered. While only a small number of the 30,000 21 track tapes and 3480 actually showed problems, their remastering has increased their accessibility dramatically as well as the longevity of their survival.
“The original target was to transcribe and preserve the 9 and 21 track tapes and as many 3480 cartridges as possible,” says Cronin. “The volume of tapes actually transcribed has increased to 640,000.”
Already, the project is proving its worth for the industry. “A large amount of the data has been accessed since remastering,” says Cronin. “More data became available as it was sorted and re-catalogued during the remastering process. There is one survey from 1978 that has been accessed five times. I cannot provide many specifics here as the access is confidential but data from over 150 remastered surveys has been accessed.”
Financially, the data is priceless, restoring it was in many ways the only option as to re-acquire it, would simply cost billions of dollars and years to achieve. “As well as preserving the older survey data, the data is now more convenient and less expensive industry to access,” says Cronin.
Meanwhile for staff at the storage facility at Geoscience Australia, the space saved merely on the physical storage of the tapes is reason enough. The line up of tapes totalled a massive 7,300 metre of tape, now with duplicate copies, the tapes store just 64 metres.
As for the original tape media, Geoscience Australia says all these were disposed of once quality control assured the correct transcription, freeing up space in their data repositories while also removing some aging redundant features. But the project is far form over yet, subsequent funding in the 2007-2008 Federal Budget has been allocated to further concentrate the digital further reducing access times and costs to use the data
Best of all though, the effects of remastered data could soon be felt at the pump. While the original proposal for the Remastering Project was prepared back in 2002, just before the price of oil escalated, future access to the data by petroleum companies could theoretically tap a bigger pool, thus potentially benefiting the consumer