Whiting Oil and Gas has purchased the Qemscan automated petrography and Helios Nanolab Dualbeam technology from FEI for its new rock lab in its Denver, Colorado, headquarters.
Qemscan provides data for reservoir characterisation, including the quantitative compositional and elastic properties critical for designing a successful hydraulic fracturing program.
Given the intensive multi-rig drilling programs at Whiting, securing Qemscan technology in-house provides real-time solutions that can be applied prior to well completions.
The Qemscan data is now being routinely used to calibrate older wireline logs, which were originally designed for conventional reservoirs but are, by themselves, inadequate in the characterisation of the newer, unconventional reservoirs that Whiting is now targeting.
Much of the oil and gas in organic shales is contained in nanometre-scale pores.
The Helios Nanolab Dualbeam images porosity networks in three dimensions with nanometre-scale resolution.
