ZEISS Mineralogic Reservoir: Automated Shale Analysis and Characterization

The increase in demand for cheaper energy, obtainable by the recovery of gas from mudrock reservoirs, has driven the requirement for geologists, geophysicists, and engineers to understand said reservoirs. Mudrock reservoirs present several complexities one of these being fine grained aggregates of silt and clay particles with micron to nanometer sized porosity and low permeabilities. These properties make characterization by conventional means, such as the optical microscope, difficult if not impossible. Due to their nature, mudrocks are better studied using the scanning electron microscope (SEM). This whitepaper describes how to analyze mudrock reservoir samples and how Zeiss' GeminiSEM technology can be used to do this.