Grow your expert team — with ours
DGI has been working with our clients to solve geoscience questions for over 25 years. The company initially focused on borehole geophysics for mineral exploration and gained a great reputation for petrophysics, especially in remote and challenging conditions. Over the years (and now decades), the team has expanded to support active mines, tailing ponds, hydroelectric dams, civil/infrastructure projects, and a wide variety of hydrogeological applications. Our skillsets have expanded too, encompassing geology, experience in geochemistry, and support for geotechnical projects.
Stress estimation
A good understanding of stress is critical to geomechanical modeling, mine design, and ground control — especially in high-stress environments. Stress is traditionally a challenging and expensive measurement, and other available methods produce sparse data that are subject to high levels of uncertainty.
DGI Geoscience can provide an estimate of the principal stress orientations from Acoustic Televiewer (ATV) breakout data — using breakout orientation data from multiple deviated boreholes (from horizontal to vertical) across a volume of interest.
“A schematic representation of the stress estimation workflow: Borehole breakouts are analyzed across the volume of interest, from which an estimation is run to identify the best-fitting stress state, represented as σ_1, σ_2, and σ_3 with stress ratio, shown on the right.”
Off-hole Structures
Drilling provides detailed information. However, it only has a small area of investigation — typically 3-4". Many of the surveys capture detailed information at the borehole wall but have no significant depth of investigation.
There are several surveys, including borehole radar, that enable off-hole remote sensing up to 40 m off hole. Radar is similar to Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), sensing differences in electromagnetic properties to identify the location, orientation and extent of fracture zones, structures, voids, and lithological changes. DGI experts can interpret these features in a 3D space, which can be incorporated into the mine or geological model.
DGI has assisted our clients in finding old mine workings, underground voids created by fluid flows, fracture and fault zones, and off-hole lithology changes. Radar can be a powerful tool to greatly enlarge the area of investigation.
Geological Consulting
DGI is your partner for challenging projects, providing field logistics, project management, data interpretation and data management services. Our team has developed custom workflows that are tightly integrated with your onsite requirements and needs.
Brief overview of a major consulting project (ongoing):
Over 60,000 m of acoustic and optical televiewers, along with physical properties such as spectral and natural gamma, were surveyed. The televiewer interpretation was done in conjunction with the core-derived lithology and core photos taken and managed by the Imago platform. This resulted in a geological model that was significantly more accurate and less costly than what would be achieved using just oriented core. Additionally, DGI field and logistics personnel worked closely with the on-site client team to ensure the surveys were completed with minimum disruption to the drilling operations — while ensuring maximum data quality. Lastly, the data processing and interpretation team created custom exports of the results to ensure a seamless data handoff.
Spector Consulting
DGI’s sister company, Kore Geosystems (koregeosystems.com) assists clients by capturing standardized and depth-referenced core images through their SPECTOR Optics technology — hosted in cloud-based core-logging software (SPECTOR Geo) with data science workflows and models (SPECTOR AI). These models enable the software to predict lithology, alteration, and RQD from the core images.
In any data science project, the consistency of labels for training data sets is of upmost importance. Without consistent, detailed, and representative labels (in this case — lithology, alteration, veining, etc.) the results will be poor.
DGI assists customers by providing experienced geologists to either log core for the training dataset or QC the logs provided by the client. DGI also assists with implementing the data science predictions into the workflow — so the client’s geological team can benefit from the productivity and workflow gains.
Core Logging Facilities
Many core logging facilities have changed little in the last twenty years. DGI has assisted many clients with modernizing workflows to minimize or eliminate the lifting of core boxes through the use of roller racking.
We can assist you with the transition to a modern, more efficient and safer work environment.
Machine Learning
The mining industry has large data sets which include geochemistry, geophysics, geotechnical, geological and hydrogeological information. DGI has been employing machine learning techniques for more than a decade to help identify patterns in the data and aid in geological interpretation. This can include Exploratory Data Analysis, Data Clustering and Predictive Modelling.