- 21 | 10 | 2024
By Christine Booton, Strategic Account Manager
Why would we Photograph geological core before disposal or transfer?
In the oil and gas industry, the collection and retention of geological samples from wells play a crucial role in understanding subsurface geology, optimising production, and ensuring environmental and operational safety. These samples provide invaluable data that help geologists, engineers, and decision-makers make informed choices throughout the life cycle of a well.
The drilling of an oil and gas well can cost anywhere from tens of millions of pounds to hundreds of millions of pounds depending on several key factors including location, depth, complexity, equipment, and labour costs.
When extracting geological samples this is a one time opportunity to acquire a physical record of the subsurface in this geographical location, once the core sample and cuttings have been extracted, they cannot be acquired again without redrilling or repositioning the well.
These geological samples provide us with information on the geological properties of the rock and support the identification of hydrocarbons during drilling. This information can be used to support production and development plans as well as enhanced oil recovery, helping to create accurate geological models that predict the distribution of reservoirs and source rocks.
Why might we want to revisit a geological sample?
Retaining geological samples creates a valuable archive that can be used for future research and development, when we are considering the disposal of this data, we are potentially losing reference data for future use.
As we have seen over the past decade there are continual developments in AI technology for analysing data, EOR techniques and repurposing of reservoirs for alternative solutions such as carbon storage.
Having the ability to revisit the physical rock samples provides geologists, and engineers with the option to do further research or project viability.
We have decided to dispose of the material but want to preserve the record. Often the samples of core and cuttings that operators are looking to dispose of have been sampled extensively and fed through a multitude of special core analysis technologies such as CT, XRF and SEM.
However geological samples serve a purpose as a physical record of the subsurface conditions encountered during drilling and should the opportunity arise to revisit the purpose of an oil well if that data is disposed of the resource is lost. By retaining a high resolution image of the core enables the geoscientist the option to review the core images for further visual analysis and additionally enables easy access and visibility to the data in digital form. Particularly for legacy UKCS samples this data may never have been photographed and sampling techniques were likely to have been less detailed. All images can be sampled globally and easily accessed via document management systems such as OASIS Document Management Systems.
