As part of our product and solution development, we have undertaken field trials in collaboration with petroleum service providers and oil companies. Field tests have been performed in challenging geographic and geologic environments, including: the complex, tectonically disturbed siliciclastic stratigraphy of the Papuan foldbelt in the remote tropical highlands of Papua New Guinea; on an off-shore rigs in the Arabian Gulf during the hot and humid summer months. 

Despite these challenges, both field trials were a complete success, with over three months of operation logged in each locality. A third trial is on-going in Europe.

In Papua New Guinea, more than 1,000 sample intervals were collected, prepared and analyzed from three separate wells, including: a gas injection well; a production well; and an exploration well. The most continuous sampling sequence comprised 728 samples collected in 34 days. The data includes ~200 million individual spectra from 1 million genuine cuttings. The efficiency of the entire workflow was tested against the ability to keep up with drilling rates, i.e. complete the analysis of the sampling sequence while “rigged-up”, and not lag behind the drill bit too much. In the case of Papua New Guinea, hardly any backlog was encountered and could always be cleared during drilling downtime associated with casing or cementation runs. The QEMSCAN log data could be updated every 40 minutes, once a sample has been measured and the data fully processed.

The field tests demonstrated that the application of our automated QEMSCAN petrography solution to onsite drill cuttings analysis can in many ways advance mudlogging. The SEM is arguably the instrument of choice for analyzing micron-scale texture of cuttings. The EDS chemical identification capabilities provide much needed detail to the compositional analysis of cuttings. Over the last decade, QEMSCAN has become the industrial standard for ultra-fast, fully automated mineral identification, with software providing unmatched image-based classification and reporting capabilities. QEMSCAN petrography analysis is used globally by leading oil and gas companies. The field tests demonstrated that the mobile, ruggedized QEMSCAN Well Site solution is reliably running in challenging rig site environments, can be operated by data engineers with no background in scanning electron microscopy, easily integrated in advanced mudlogging services, and provides unprecedented cuttings data.

Sample preparation has been optimized to create representative sample blocks from challenging material within less than half an hour. As a result, the sample preparation can in general keep up with the speed of drilling and allows for setting up measurements in parallel. In these field tests, measurement parameters were optimized to provide detailed compositional and textural data within less than 40 minutes. Mineral identification protocols have been developed that can reliably identify and quantify all major phases, clay mineralogy, and selected heavy and trace mineral phases. In the field test, a stepping interval of 20 microns has been consistently applied to all measurements and is demonstrated to be sufficient to highlight important textural detail. During downtime, measurements at higher spatial resolution can be performed to show additional detail. The results from Papua New Guinea are on average based on >2,000 drill cuttings providing more confidence in the sample statistics.

Data acquisition parameters, data analysis, workflow and reporting have been determined in close collaboration with our Joint Development Partners, including a wide range of professionals at the well-site and at the on-shore operational centers. Their help and assistance is much appreciated.