Micromine Technical Product Manager, Frank Bilki attended and presented at the 2018 Australian Exploration Geoscience Conference in Sydney.
Frank presented on the work that has gone into Micromine 2018 to develop it’s capabilities around 3D seismic data.
The Conference and Exhibition was home to the highest quality technical program that members have grown accustomed to from the three organisations over the years and followed on from the Adelaide Conference of August 2016. The Conference also incorporated the Eastern Australian Basins Symposium (QLD, NSW, VIC and TAS) as EABS, Central Basins Symposium (SA and NT) as CABS and the Western Australian Basins Symposium as WABS.
Below you can read Frank Bilki’s presentation abstract and see some pictures from the conference.
The rise of 3D seismic in hardrock mineral exploration
3D seismic has been a cornerstone of the coal and petroleum industries for decades. And yet, its adoption by the hardrock minerals industry has been much slower. This delay has many causes,
with the most obvious being the sheer complexity of acquiring and processing seismic data in a hardrock setting. Fortunately, this topic is the subject of much ongoing research.
A less obvious cause is the limitations of the available software for visualising and interpreting the processed data. Hardrock miners have long enjoyed the flexibility of general mining packages (GMPs) for displaying, analysing, and modelling everything from first-pass geochemical sampling to optimised long-term production scheduling. But these applications are optimised towards massive numbers of drillholes, block (voxel) models, and triangulations, and they perform poorly when asked to display 3D seismic. The result is a massive file, with a long loading time and slow graphics interaction. On the other hand, petroleum software is optimised towards seismic data, but can’t handle massive numbers of drillholes.
These limitations can be overcome by incorporating modern gaming graphics technology and efficient file storage platforms within an application, and this presentation concludes by illustrating the results of applied research and development carried out at MICROMINE towards producing a fluid real-time seismic visualisation environment within the Micromine product.
