Jun 8 2012
FEI announced today that it has received multiple bookings for its “Core-to-Pore” petrography workflow and QEMSCAN® WellSite™ analysis solutions.
“FEI has made great inroads in developing technology and workflows to better characterize reservoirs around the world, from sandstone to carbonates to shale. In the past few months, bookings of these systems have increased worldwide – including China, Europe, the Middle East and the US,” stated Paul Scagnetti, FEI’s vice president and general manager of the Natural Resources Business Unit. “And it is not just the research centers,” he adds. “We are receiving orders from service suppliers and the oil & gas companies as well. For example, we recently signed a fee-based agreement with a major oil service company to provide on-site automated surface logging using the QEMSCAN WellSite analysis solution for a U.S. customer.”
The QEMSCAN WellSite analysis solution enables surface logging service providers to greatly enhance the quality, consistency and value of their mudlogging services for the oil & gas industry. It can quickly separate and classify the rock types (lithologies) represented in a cuttings sampling interval with greater accuracy, analytical sensitivity and textural resolution than existing manual methods, permitting a highly-detailed analysis of cuttings properties, such as clay type, matrix density or grain size, on a lithology basis. It is rugged and portable―designed for and tested at remote locations, such as on- and off-shore drilling rigs.
In Europe and the Middle East, multiple operators have added the QEMSCAN 650F system to their central lab facilities to characterize core and cuttings samples from different types of oil and gas reservoirs. In addition, it enables users to look at large areas with high resolution through the use of the MAPS tiling & stitching software.
Søren Frank, Head of the Maersk Oil Research and Technology Centre (MO-RTC) at Qatar Science & Technology Park (QSTP), sees the QEMSCAN as part of a workflow to better characterize the carbonate and complex sandstone fields in the Maersk Oil assets. “The QEMSCAN data have proven crucial in the past to assist in improving geological correlations and understanding mineral distribution of 3D images from micro-CT scans.”
The MAPS software on the QEMSCAN system is FEI’s latest addition to its core-to-pore petrography workflow. MAPS enables customers to make mosaics of high resolution SEM images. Traditionally, high resolution means very small field of view; raising considerable concerns about the representative nature of the submicron features imaged. With MAPS it becomes possible to image the full core plug surface at whatever resolution the user selects. Access to nanoscale information at the core plug scale is an example where multi scale imaging benefits both drilling and production companies in making more informed decisions.
“The next few months will be very exciting for FEI as we continue to help our customers make progress in exploration and production,” Scagnetti commented, “and we move from the lab to the wellsite where direct access to data can mean both huge savings and increased output.”
For more information about FEI Natural Resources, please visit: www.fei-natural-resources.com.