FEI has launched the Helios Nanolab Dualbeam system for analysing the production characteristics and potential of unconventional gas reservoirs.
The system images kerogen, porosity and microstructures in three dimensions (3D) with nanometre-scale resolution.
The data are essential to determining the production potential of the reservoir, optimising extraction procedures and designing simulators of the nanoscale pore structure.
Dr Paul Scagnetti, vice-president and general manager - natural resources division at FEI, said: 'Huge reserves of natural gas are known to exist in unconventional gas reservoirs, but it is difficult to produce this gas because it is trapped in poorly connected networks of pores with dimensions as small as a few nanometres.
'The ability to understand the structure of these networks allows geologists to make more accurate predictions of producible gas and optimise its extraction,' he added.
The Helios system captures images and develops a 3D microstructural model of the pore structure, including the sub-volumes of kerogen and its connectivity.
The University of Oklahoma, in collaboration with Devon Energy, is an early adopter of the solution.
The data produced by the Helios are central to a series of recent publications that cast these unconventional reservoirs in a new, more complex light.
Dr Carl Sondergeld, professor and Curtis W Mewbourne chair at the Mewbourne School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering, Oklahoma University, said: 'This imaging and analysis capability is the gateway to understanding, and more efficiently extracting, gas from these global hydrocarbon assets.
'Early observations demonstrate that organic matter is distributed differently in different shales, and that this organic material is more porous than previously imagined.
'The pores are so small that they require new physical controls on the behaviours of gases.
'The existence of this previously un-imaged pore space helps to explain why there is so much producible gas in shales.
'The images also explain why production declines so rapidly in some of the unconventional shale reservoirs.
'As a result, this new information is forcing many to reconsider previously held beliefs about unconventional shale reservoirs.'
