This summer the Library added six students and three longer term contract staff to our team. Although we had to say goodbye to our excellent team members Liz and Maia,our new group is trained and keen to serve the industry. Throughout the summer our group has enjoyed many opportunities to visit sites and learn about the industry, its history and geology. None of this would have been possible without all our great Ontario operators. The new crew has also been very busy maintaining and creating useful data sets that I will share with you today.

    A very special thank you to all the operators and industry people that spent time educating
our students, a few highlights are in the photo below: ​​​​​​​

In this photo (upper-left proceeding clockwise): A visit to the blacksmith shop at Fairbank Oil Properties where we learned the history of oil production in Ontario; Formosa reef roadcut is an interesting place to see Devonian stratigraphy; Big “T” Oil & Gas demonstrating cable tool drilling to the new generation; The Devil’s Punchbowl conservation area is a good place to see nearly all of the Lower Silurian strata.

New Data in 2018

Base Fresh Water

    This is an attempt at mapping the deepest fresh water reported in the water well database. The report is available for immediate download and shows some interesting trends and deep fresh water zones:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.ogsrlibrary.com/open/OFDR-2018-1-Base-Fresh-Water.pdf

Base Sulphur Water

    Following the Base of Fresh Water report an attempt was made to map the deepest sulphur water zone using the Oil, Gas and Salt Resources Act borings (petroleum well database). The resulting report is available for immediate download and layers for GIS are available to Library members:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.ogsrlibrary.com/open/OFDR-2018-2-Base-Sulphur-Water.pdf

Porosity Permeability Database

    Approximately 1100 rock cores have been taken from Oil, Gas and Salt Resources borings in Ontario. Of these 491 cores are accompanied by laboratory core analyses. The Library has digitized all 491 analyses and created a standardized database with porosity and permeability values for over 28 000 measured intervals. See details about this data below in Craig’s report. This data is available now to members.

Brittain Archives

    The historic collection of former petroleum well inspector W.D. Brittain was donated to the Library by Charlie Fairbank. After receiving the collection in the spring, we have been busy scanning and digitizing thousands of documents and large-scale maps. The work is nearly complete and the entire collection will soon be available through a dedicated portal on the OGSR Library website. There are many interesting and historic well location maps to check out, continue down below to read more about the project from our archivist, Nicole!

Well Card Records

    A collection of historic well cards had been donated to the Library from Union Gas. This summer several boxes of cards in the Niagara area were matched to existing wells or used to create new well records. These will be added to the existing well file catalogue that is already available online and in the Library.

Cavern Inventory

    New uses for storage caverns have created interest around the size, locations, and potential locations of solution mined salt caverns in Ontario. Overview data on caverns will be available to members later this year. All data is summarized from well file scans currently available.

Salt Mapping

    Salt maps by Bailey and Cochrane were digitized to shapefiles as a companion to cavern inventory work. These maps are being further enhanced by refining the Library geology database through quality assurance efforts and these updates are applied to further refine the salt shapefiles. Shapefiles are available to Library members.

    Did you know that most data available from the Library is available as a set or on a per well basis? Some data may already be entirely free for members. Here are the most popular datasets available from the Library and some of the delivery options that can arranged by contacting us:

New Ways to Access Data

    We hope to continue delivering more value to our members and the industry. Our servers are overflowing with logs and imagery that is currently being underutilized where it is needed in exploration. The Library will soon be experimenting with a subscription model that will allow standard members to view more data online and for an extra fee download a nearly limitless amount of material for use on your own machines and in your own software. Stay tuned for details!

    Thank you industry for making this a fantastic 20^th anniversary year for the OGSR Library!

    Much progress has been made on all of the exciting videos we discussed back in our last quarterly edition in July. Here I’ll provide updates on the EPEX 2018 conference presentation videos, our field trips, plans for our YouTube channel, and finish off by sharing some info on the equipment we’re using. It’s been a busy summer!

    Gold volume videos: Remember the OPI conference gold volumes? They’re back… but in video form! Those who attended EPEX 2018: OPI’s 56^th Annual Conference got to see some great presentations. Armed with my camera and a stack of release forms, they were all captured on video. I’m now happy to say that editing is complete and soon these talks will be available on our YouTube channel. We will be announcing when you can watch them in an upcoming newsletter so be on the lookout.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

    Lots of great video was shot during our summer field trips. I mentioned in my last update that we’d be using this footage to help us decide where we’ll go for future trips and to promote these great areas. Versions of these videos where shown at the library before our summer students finished for the year. It was recently decided that we would spruce some of these up with narration and upload them to our YouTube channel. Our first release will be our trip to the Formosa reef. 

    Geology Gals? Rhys and Hanna, the Library's GIS technician and geology technician will be starring in a series of short videos designed to help students. These videos will promote the use of library data and engage with the geology student community.   

    What’s in my bag? My personal camera is the Sony a6300. It offers 4K video and high frame rates for slow motion recording up to 120fps. It also has great autofocus and its small size means it’s less intimidating to people. The library has a Nikon D810 which is primarily used for core photography but also shoots beautiful video. It’s a beast of a camera but trickier to use due to its larger size, lack of stabilization, and no useable autofocus. We’ve used it for some training videos and under controlled circumstances the results are quite good. For audio we have a Rode mic that plugs into either camera and sits on top. For our conference videos we have a little audio recorder which we plug directly into the soundboard. This gives us much better results than recording with a mic. For editing I use Adobe Premiere Pro which offers great integration with the rest of the Adobe creative suite.

    Our YouTube channel is about to burst with content. We hope you enjoy what we’ve been up to. Our goal is education with a side of fun. To see what we’ve posted so far go to www.youtube.com/ogsrlibrary

    In the past year, the OGSR geology team has been working hard on revising the subsurface salt front map based on Sanford’s (1977) in collaboration with the Ontario Geological Survey (OGS), Geologic Society of Canada (GSC) and Ministry of Natural Resources and Forests (MNRF). This project also forms a part of the dissolved salt cavern project exploring potential storages for compressed air energy or natural gas in southwestern (SW) Ontario. Subsurface bedrock aquifers and aquitards are also present in context with the salt-bearing strata. Re-picking and re-mapping these geologic units are significant in improving the understanding of the salt-solution mechanics, bedrock aquifer distribution, groundwater flow pattern and energy storage location.

    The scope of this project covers the whole of southwestern Ontario. Overall, 2000 wells have been selected for quality assurance. Geophysical well logs, drill cuttings and cored wells have been examined to confirm/update the picks. Over 4,000 formational tops have been re-picked and updated in the Ontario Petroleum Data System (OPDS).

    There are four salt-bearing formations within the Silurian Salina Group, i.e. A2 Unit, B Unit, D Unit and F Unit. They spread nearly 16,000 km² in Ontario with the maximum thickness over 90m. During the deposition of Salina Group (420 Ma), SW Ontario was covered by shallow inland sea with restricted outlets to oceans. The arid climate has driven rapid evaporation of sea-water to form concentrated brine and deposited evaporites and salts in Michigan and Appalachian basins. All Salina salt beds exhibit evidence of dissolution after deposition, indicating the salt was dissolved subsequent to deposition and burial periodically. The solution front of the salt beds thins from tens of meters to zero within a short distance (1km). Also, formation of salt caverns provides accommodation space for energy storage in the subsurface of Ontario. Therefore, the re-picked the salt-bearing units by well logs and drill cuttings provide evidence for accurate mapping of the salt solution edges. The new map will be created and published by the year 2019.

    The underlying Lockport Group, including Gasport, Goat Island, Eramosa and Guelph formations in ascending order, has also been picked to complete the OPDS database. The Guelph Formation is generally quite karstic and brecciated, which contains pinnacle structures as oil/gas traps in SW Ontario. The overlying Salina A Unit usually contains evaporites and tight dolostones acting as seal layers. In previous works, the Gasport and Goat Island formations were not well picked in the OPDS. As the basal dolostone, the deposition and erosion of the Gasport Formation played an important role in controlling the geometry of the overlying Goat Island Formation as well as the variability of the pinnacle plays in the subsurface. Therefore, the updated geology picks provide new materials for further study of Silurian oil and gas traps in Ontario.

    Overlying the Salina Group, the Silurian Bass Islands Formation and the Devonian Bois Blanc Formation, Detroit River Group (including Sylvania, Amherstburg and Lucas formations in ascending order) and Dundee Formation are important bedrock aquifers in SW Ontario with several major unconformities. The Dundee Formation is also a major oil/gas producing interval in Ontario. Problems remain in the lateral distribution of the very chert-y Bois Blanc and Amherstburg formations and the evaporitic Lucas Formation because of the uncharacteristic geophysical well logs among these geologic units. With the study of cored wells, drill cuttings and observation of carbonate microfacies under microscope in the past summer, criteria for these formational tops have been renewed in combination of a preliminary depositional model. More geology projects will be carried out in the next a few years for further studies on the porosity/permeability of these bedrock aquifers and oil/gas reservoirs integrated with lithofacies analysis and sequence stratigraphy studies, aiming at exploring groundwater flow patterns and predicting oil/gas reservoir sites.

    Hello everyone, this is my first article for the Quarterly, so allow me to introduce myself. My name is Nicole Schoenberger, and as a recent graduate from Western University’s Master of Library and Information Science program, I’m working as the OGSR Library as a contract Archivist responsible for this year’s Brittain Archive project. 

    Work and progress on the Brittain Archive project continues as we get into Fall. Along with Bayden and Rhys (looking after the many incredible maps in the collection), much of my summer was dedicated to digitizing the material we received in a generous donation from Charlie Fairbank. This includes correspondence, production figures, reports, notes, drafts, legislation, and a variety of maps. Currently I am cataloging the scanned images – over 25,000 in total – so that the finished database can be searched by author, date, location, and type of document. This will allow eventual users to search for specific material or simply browse the collection. 

    Along with organizing the scanned images for easier navigation, I’m creating and updating documentation and guidelines to make sure that others working on this collection can start easily, or for similar projects in the future. This project is funded through Library and Archives Canada’s Documentary Heritage Communities Program (DHCP), and once everything is organized into an online portal, it will be made available not only to members, but to the public as well. Learn more about historical wells and operations in Ontario, read through correspondence, and see how the oil and gas industries have changed! To check out other projects funded through Library and Archivies Canada, click here.

    Starting at the library I had very little knowledge about oil, gas, and salt in Ontario (and Canada). I'm learning more about the oil and gas industries through working with the Brittain collection and the Library in general. I am furthering my experience with digitization and catalogin, and I am proud to see this project take shape into a fascinating and engaging resource for the industry. Along with Bayden, Rhys, Sama, and the rest of the Library, I’m extremely excited for the Brittain portal to be launched. 

 Come visit the Library on November 16th from 10am-2pm for a day filled with Geography Week activities!

    Last year this event brought over 90 industry professionals, students, professors and visitors to the library. We showcased GIS tutorials, mineral and photography displays, drones, data sets and more. This year the library is showcasing the behind the scenes to our data - the data management and data organization side. Come take a look at what happens behind the scenes of layers, attribute tables, and web portals. We hope to see some familiar faces, along with some new ones at this event. There will be posters, prizes, interactive displays, and a pizza lunch for those who attend. We hope to see you there!

If you would like to get involved, email [email protected]

    Working at the OGSR Library was a wonderful experience, learning a great deal about the oil, gas, & salt industry as well as Ontario’s rich geology. I’ve had a blast working with everyone at the Library and going on some amazing trips, like going to visit a real life drill rig in late August. ​​​​​​​

    I have had the wonderful privilege of building a web portal for presenting archival materials donated to the Library. One of the first archives that will be available is the “Brittain Archive” when the website goes live later this year. If you’re into geophysics and looking to get you’re hands on some more data for well logging, you’ll be happy the hear that the Library will be adding LAS (Log ASCII Standard) to it’s list of available products for members!

    I was fortunate enough to be the geological laboratory assistant this past summer at the OGSR Library and now work part time while attending my 3rd year in geology at Western University. With all the knowledge and skills gained along the way – from the Geology QA Project I worked on with geologist Shuo Sun and from everyday tasks in the lab - I have truly solidified my passion for geology and oil & gas exploration. The QA project has helped me become more familiar with identifying different lithologies and analyzing well logs – which I am using quite a lot in my petroleum course this year. I am excited to continue working at the Library to sample wash new samples we have received and to get a sneak peak of new drill cuttings. Constantly being around everything geology related has made me feel at “home” and I thank the OGSR Library for giving me this opportunity! 

    Over this summer, here at the Library I have been a part of several tasks. Such as the DHCP- Brittain Archives and Identifying unknown core in the back warehouse of the OGSR Library. As well as taking part in two field trips this summer that of which were very educational but were nothing far from lack-lustring as each field trip brought something new to learn and new sights to see.

    Nicole our Archivist and I were assigned on the Brittain Archives digitization project (funded through the Documentary Heritage Communities Program (DHCP) through Library and Archives Canada). This includes digitizing archive documents through scanning, cataloguing the scanned images, updating image database for a public portal. We were hard at work scanning away and managed to scan all of the documents in the Brittain Archives. That’s over twenty-five thousand images! From there we began to enter the data we found on the images into a spreadsheet so that all the data from the images could be uploaded to the database for a public portal so people could view them without having to come into the library.

    Identifying unknown core in the back warehouse a project assigned to Ben, Evan, and I during what was our office clean up week. We started with over 600 boxes of unidentified core in the back warehouse, but got the number down to approximately 190 boxes that were left unidentified. This means that there are at least 400 new boxes of core that consumers can come and look at now!

    My experience at the Library this year has been the best so far. I’m sad to be leaving it again as this was my third summer and my forth time leaving here, it never gets easier the more you leave. Every time I come to work at the Library it is like I had never left to begin with. Everyone has always been so nice and welcoming at the library that it feels as though I have known everyone longer then what I actually have. I know that the Library will continue to do great things in the future. I look forward to seeing what the library will be doing next.

    Summer is ending which means it’s time for me to bring you, the reader, up to speed on what I have been doing. For the remainder of my summer, I continued to work on the project that I was initially assigned to when summer began and I started working full time.

    For those of you that didn’t read last month’s newsletter where I summarized what this project is, put simply, what I am doing is going through boxes full of donated well cards, finding the well for each card on our website, and writing the corresponding license number on the card. Each box a couple thousand well cards in them and it takes me about a minute to find the license for the well. The purpose of this project is to take these historic well cards and incorporate them in our digital archive so that people can access this information online. When this project is complete, all of these historic well cards will be accessible on our website and here at the library but there is still a long way to go before we’re finished. I also worked on a project that involved identifying unknown core with my co-workers and friends, Bayden and Evan. There were originally 600 unknown core boxes, but we managed to identify approximately 400 boxes which are now available for viewing.

    I can't help but reflect on the experiences that I have had in the last seven months that I have worked here. I am very grateful to my manager Jordan for giving me the opportunity to work at the OGSR Library. Working here, I have improved on many of my skills and even acquired some new ones as well. I have learned a lot about the industry, geology and geography and have decided that I want to become involved in this job area in the future. Over the course of working here, the members of our small staff have evolved from co-workers to friends. From the very beginning, the staff at the OGSR Library has been very welcoming and has made work feel almost like a second home rather than a job. I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work alongside. It has been an exciting 7 months and I am really going to miss working here.​​​​​​​

        I recently had the pleasure of starting work as a Geochemical Analyst with the Oil, Gas and Salt Resources Library in September 2018. I was quick to appreciate working with such a great group of people and a wealth of information at my fingertips in this organization. 

        After fatefully taking a geology elective in my then-BA, I completed a BSc in Earth Surface Science at the University of Guelph and an MSc in Geology at Western University. Since 2012, I have worked with the Ontario Geological Survey on geochemical projects, from stream sampling along Lake Erie, to collecting lake sediments from a helicopter north of Thunder Bay, to taking hundreds of groundwater samples across southern Ontario. My MSc dissertation looked at characterizing and explaining unique water quality in eastern Ontario, where I argued that 10,000-year-old seawater still lingers in shallow aquifers! 

        As I have been long interested in water quality, I am very excited to be working on some collaborative groundwater applications here at the library. Water work is important since about a third of Ontario residents depend on groundwater for everyday needs. For me, the cool thing about water in nature is that it’s never just water! Water almost always has little dissolved particles in it that give it distinct and interesting characteristics. Groundwater sits in rock or sediment for quite a while, which allows it to dissolve bits of the aquifer it sits in. This means that different geological environments will serve you different types of water. It may have a metallic taste, smell like rotten eggs, be different colours or even be bubbly like champagne! ​​​​​​​

    Previously mentioned in our April 2018 Newsletter, the Permeability and Porosity Database has now been completed! This database will now be available to our members.

    The OGSR Library has prepared a database digitizing the analysis of 492 rock cores from wells in Ontario. The database has over 28,000 lines of data with over 500,000 data points from rock core analysis between 1954 and 2010.

    The Porosity and Permeability Database reports parameters of permeability, porosity, fluid saturation, and grain density for each interval analyzed. Permeability data can be used to inform flow capacity and gravity drainage potential, whereas porosity data provides an indication of the storage capacity of the rock. Fluid saturation of oil and water were analyzed and can imply the presence and quantity of these fluids within a reservoir. Finally, grain density can be used to confirm the mineralogy of the core. The Guelph formation, a known oil and gas producing formation, is well represented in the database. A breakdown of all the parameters within the database are explained in the table below. Geographical locations of rock cores present in the database are found in Figure 1.

        This database will compliment the 10,000 core photos at the library, including both flash photography and ultra-violet light, which can be used to identify the presence of hydrocarbons.