Abstract

The Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) is a research unit within the Jackson School of Geosciences at The University of Texas at Austin. In addition, the BEG serves the State of Texas as the Texas Geological Survey. In this role, BEG maintains a variety of public resources and facilities, including three Core Research Centers (CRC), a geoscience and engineering technical library, and the Geophysical Log Facility. The Core Research Centers, all state-of-the-art facilities, store more than 2 million items of geologic material, including core, cuttings, outcrop samples, thin sections, and paleontological/palynological and geochemical samples. The collection, acquired originally by oil and gas exploration companies and now publicly available for research or teaching, represents one of the largest collections of subsurface geologic samples in the United States.

Recently, BEG received two large donations of cores and cuttings from two major petroleum companies. The donations include a substantial amount of material from the Permian Basin, and several thousand boxes have been sent directly to the Midland CRC. The Midland CRC was donated to the University by Shell Oil Company in 1994. This building contains office space, core-examination-layout and processing rooms, and a 39,000-ft2 warehouse, which increased in capacity by 13,000 ft² as a result of a donation by Altura Energy, Ltd., in 2000. The facility contains over 500,000 boxes of core and cuttings.

The first BEG Core Research Center to be established is the Austin CRC. Located in UT’s Pickle Research Campus in NW Austin, this facility houses more than 700,000 boxes of core and cuttings from all over the world in a 93,000-ft² warehouse. The building also contains core-examination-layout and processing rooms. The Houston Research Center (HRC) was donated to the University in 2002 by BP and is the most recently established BEG facility. The center currently houses over 725,000 boxes of rock material and is equipped to permanently store and curate more than 900,000 boxes of geologic core and cuttings. The facility includes a warehouse, offices, laboratories, core-layout room, and two conference rooms in its 110,000-ft² space.

BEG maintains a searchable database of all publicly available geologic and geophysical materials stored at all of the BEG facilities. Located on the BEG website, patrons can search the database for samples based on criteria such as state/province, API number, county/parish, operator, lease/well name, field, depth, or sample type. The database is continually updated, and the user interface will soon provide both GIS- and text- based searches.