SAM Exploration Geoscience

Leaders:  James Cleverley (CSIRO), Peter Hornby (CSIRO), Klaus Regenauer-Lieb (CSIRO and UWA), Thomas Poulet (CSIRO), Lutz Gross (UQ)

Sponsors: Minerals Down Under Flagship Program at CSIRO, AuScope & the University of Queensland

Goals: Exploration Geosciences is the understanding of earth processes, and their influence on the spatial location and formation of earth resources such as mineral deposits, oil and gas, and geothermal energy sources.

To be truly predictive about the location of new resources and understand their processes of formation (why is the gold there?) it is important to gain an quantitative understanding of the way physical processes interact and couple to produce the end result.  The Reactive Transport (RT) code and its graphical user interface – the Desktop Modelling Toolkit (DMT) is a simulation platform for coupled modelling of fluid-flow, heat and mass transport and chemical reaction in a fully integrated environment.  The code was developed by CSIRO during the predictive Mineral Discovery CRC using the Fastflo solver but recently this has been ported to Escript with development through the CSIRO Minerals Down Under Flagship and Auscope.

The code allows users to build and run complex 2/3D models of thermal-flow with chemical reactions solved using the Gibbs Minimisation approach in the WinGibbs solver (Hch by Shvarov & Bastrakov, 1999).  Future developments will see the development of a single unified approach to solving the coupling between the physical processes and the feedbacks, including work within Minerals Down Under and the Western Australia Center of Excellence for Geothermal to couple mechanical processes through codes such as Abaqus.  By understanding the coupled processes, and they way they evolve through feedback we can start to quantify the response that are needed in locating new earth resources.

Demonstrator Project: Alligator Rivers Uranium Field

Partners: CSIRO, PMD*CRC, Northern Territory Government, Aldershot Resources Ltd, Cameco, Compass Resources NL, Deep Yellow Limited, ERA, Laramide Resources Ltd, Northern Uranium, Uranium Equities.

Description: Use Reactive Transport modelling  to develop a predictive understanding of the processes and factors which control the formation of the unconformity–related uranium deposits in the Alligator Rivers area and to attempt to predict the relative favourability for the location of new deposits.

AuScope infrastructure used:  Reactive Transport.

Left: Model Setup. Right: Example case where an oxidised basement is assumed  the permeability of the fault is equal to that of the sandstone. Uraninite precipitates occurs deep into the basement and is significantly increased. The maximum uraninite concentration is 0.003 moles.

Demonstrator Project: Listric Fault Granite Model

Partners: CSIRO & PMD*CRC

Description: Listric Fault Granite model (LFG) is set to explore the bahaviour of a fully coupled reactive transport simulation in a geometrical complex scenario in particular in the case of the formations of gold deposits. This demonstrator predicts a mass content of gold after 155000 years of simulation time. From the composition of species physical rock properties such as density and wave speed can be calculated.

AuScope infrastructure used: Reactive Transport
 

 Left: Model Setup. Right: Predicted gold content in the model after 155000years.

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