photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

Assistant Researcher at the KGS Olivia Jones cuts into the core extracted from a well in Lyon County on July 9, 2024.

Below the surface of Lyon County, there are layers of rock and coal from hundreds of millions of years ago — but there might also be important materials that are essential for electric cars, solar panels and many other eco-friendly and high-tech products.

The Kansas Geological Survey wants to find out if those “critical minerals” are there. And that has meant drilling down thousands of feet and extracting a “core” — a more than 100-foot rock sample that they can analyze in the lab.

KGS received a $2,606,250 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for the project, which is part of the Carbon Ore, Rare Earth, and Critical Minerals Initiative, or CORE-CM, which aims to strengthen the critical minerals supply chain and make these materials more easily accessible in the United States.

According to a report from the International Energy Agency, critical minerals will become more difficult for electric vehicle, wind turbine and solar panel manufacturers to access unless more investments are made in finding these resources and making them available. Such minerals, often sourced overseas from countries like China and India, face supply disruption risks, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

Stephan Oborny, principal investigator of the project at the KGS, points on a geological map of Kansas to where the Lyon County core was extracted on July 9, 2024.

Brendan Bream, associate director of energy and stratigraphy at KGS, said the research will help figure out how much of these resources this area of Kansas has. If these underground rock layers contain critical minerals, it may mean there are more of these elements in the area, potentially providing a significant source for technologies that are in high demand.

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Extracting the core

In May, the drilling and extraction of the core took place in northwest Lyon County. But the KGS scientists weren’t doing the drilling themselves.

A project like this takes a lot of collaboration. The team working on the project includes several collaborators from Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, Oklahoma and the Osage Nation. There are some specialized companies involved, such as Mull Companies, an independent oil and gas company; Lighthouse Drilling; Kudu Coring; and ELI Wireline.

The process of collecting this whole-rock core – ranging in depth from 2,330 feet to 2,449 feet – takes a couple of days and involves removing cylindrical sections of rock from a wellbore, a hole used for accessing subsurface resources. The Lighthouse drilling crew has to work around the clock.

“They don’t shut down once you start drilling; you go all the way,” said Stephan Oborny, principal investigator of the project. “The rate of drilling will affect your recovery (of the core).”

Sections of the core are removed and cleaned to be stored in boxes and taken back to the lab for analysis.

photo by: Contributed

Crew members from Kudu Coring, Lighthouse Drilling, Mull Companies and the Kansas Geological Survey extract core from the Lyon County well.

In addition, after the removal of the core, sensors are lowered into the wellbore to analyze rock properties that surround the core, such as elemental richness, using a specialized geochemical wireline tool.

The measurements this tool takes are similar to the ones that will be taken when the researchers directly analyze the core, only at a coarser resolution, Bream said. When both of the analyses are done, the results can be compared to determine whether the wireline tool is reliable as another potential method of geochemical exploration.

Measuring the core

When the whole-rock core arrives at the University of Kansas, it goes through a device called a multi-sensor core logger, which provides detailed data about the rocks in it.

The device measures the 119-foot core every 5 centimeters, looking at the concentrations of different elements, the rock density, magnetic susceptibility, natural radioactivity and more. There is also a camera equipped to take high-resolution images of the core.

“Every core is different,” said Rachel Smith, laboratory program director at the KGS. “So you have to look at it and figure out how you’re going to attack it.”

Bream said these measurements are pieces of a bigger jigsaw puzzle and will help us understand what’s going on in the subsurface.

photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

Rachel Smith, laboratory program director at the KGS, and Joseph Tierney, temporary research assistant at KGS, stand next to the multi sensor core logger, which takes detailed measurements of core on July 5, 2024.

“The machine will help us quantify critical mineral abundances,” Bream said. “We run (the core) through and collect information at a very high resolution; we collect a bunch of data and then that helps us understand all the different layers and rock types.”

Eventually, this information from the instrument will be archived and added to state and national databases so that anybody can evaluate it, Bream said. This data could help the public make decisions about oil and gas and other natural resources.

This information will also become important as the next group of geologists cut into the core and compare eye-catching characteristics of the rock with the data from the multi-sensor core logger.

What’s inside the core

Massive beds of coal – the most plentiful nonrenewable energy source in the fossil fuel family – are typical in this part of Kansas during the Pennsylvanian subperiod of geologic time, occurring 299 million to 323 million years ago. And the core the researchers are analyzing clearly shows that.

“This core has the largest sections of coal I have ever seen in a Kansas core,” assistant researcher Olivia Jones said.

The Lyon County core has a unique pattern of light gray limestone, dark shales and coal, and this gradient pattern was created by fluctuations in water levels. KGS researchers are wondering how these shifts happened in the first place.

The Pennsylvanian was marked by significant glacial and interglacial events due to ice collapsing at high altitudes. Both water depth and oxygen content can influence how critical elements are deposited, so understanding the pattern of the rocks and how they correlate through the region is important, Oborny said.

These observations will help them test various hypotheses as to why and where they will find critical elements.

photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

The Lyon County core is stored in several boxes on July 9, 2024 to contain all 119 feet of the core.

Jones cuts the core along its length so KGS researchers can get a closer look. Cutting the rock will create a flat surface to help the scientists collect physical samples of promising areas that may contain critical minerals. Those areas were determined with the help of the multi-sensor core logger.

Oborny said the changes of color in the core also represent a new time period. They hope to figure out if the critical minerals are time dependent and if there are certain periods that contain them.

Next steps

The next phase of this project is still in the works, Bream said. Phase 2 of the Department of Energy’s CORE-CM effort is still under review, but it will eventually award several grants of up to $7.5 million each. They expect to know about the funding in October of this year.

“We will remain involved with the assessment of critical mineral resources in Kansas through multiple federal grants currently underway from the Department of Energy and the US Geological Survey,” Bream said.

And while they’ll continue investigating the area in Lyon County for minerals, that’s not the only kind of resources these researchers are interested in finding. They’re also interested in looking at Permian aged evaporites — salt — in southwestern Kansas.

“If granted, this funding would allow us to continue a more rigorous subsurface investigation of the underground mineral resources in eastern Kansas as well as other potential sources of critical minerals elsewhere in the state,” Bream said.