The Potash Identification (PID) Plot: A Rapid Screening Crossplot for Discrimination of Commercial Potash
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Potash minerals are the primary source of potassium (K), which is used for the manufacture of gunpowder, fertilizer, and as a sodium-seasoning substitute. Commercial potash minerals are all evaporites. Because potassium-40 (40K) is radioactive (decaying to argon-40 (40Ar) and releasing a gamma ray (GR) in the process), commercial potash mineralization is often discovered when GR (γ ray) logs in petroleum wells drilled through evaporite sequences “go off scale.” However, not all potash minerals may be commercial sources of potassium via underground mining techniques, and potassium is not the only radioactive element. For example, the mineralogy of the McNutt “potash” Member of the Salado Formation in southeast (SE) New Mexico is extremely complex, consisting of multiple thin (i.e., less than 10 ft thick) beds of six low-grade (radioactive) potash minerals, only two of which are commercial for underground mining. There are also four nonradioactive evaporite minerals, one of which may interfere with potash milling chemistry and numerous claystones and marker beds (shales and/or volcanics), with GR count rates comparable to the low-grade potash mineralization in this sequence. Because of this complexity, traditional borehole wireline (WL) and logging-while-drilling (LWD) potash assay techniques, such as GR log-to-core assay transforms, may not be sufficient to identify potentially commercial potash mineralization for underground mining (Teufel, 2008) in SE New Mexico. Crain and Anderson (1966) and Hill (2019) developed linear programming and multimineral analyses, respectively, to estimate potash mineralogy and grades from multiple borehole geophysical measurements. However, both of these approaches require large sets of multiple log measurements. In SE New Mexico, petroleum wells are drilled through the Salado Formation evaporite (including the McNutt “potash” Member) with air, then cased and cemented in place without running WL measurements. Then, the wells are drilled out to total depth (TD) in the underlying sediments with water-based mud. Complete log suites are run from TD to the casing shoe, with only the GR and neutron logs recorded through the cased evaporite sequence for stratigraphic and structural correlation. As a result, essentially all recent oil and gas wells in SE New Mexico have casedhole gamma ray and neutron logs through the Salado evaporite. Hill and Crain (2020) developed a simple crossplot involving only GR and neutron log data, which could discriminate between anhydrous and hydrated potassium evaporite minerals. Logs from these wells could provide a rapid potash screening database if used properly. This technique can be used with both openhole and casedhole petroleum well logs, as well as corehole WL logs, and provides discrimination of commercial potash mineralization from noncommercial (potash and non-potash) radioactive mineralization. Case histories of the use of PID crossplots in evaporite basins of Michigan, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, and SE New Mexico are described. This technique may also be useful in screening potential potash deposits elsewhere in the world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".