Shale gas is becoming one of the major sources of natural gas in recent years. Soon gas shale reservoirs will not be considered as unconventional gas since production of gas from this source is becoming as common as conventional reservoirs.

One of the major challenges of gas shale reservoirs is to apply conventional log data to acquire reservoir rock properties. Organic matter richness, thermal maturity status, porosity, permeability, frees gas saturation, adsorbed gas volume and rock mechanical characteristics are among those critical parameters that have to be estimated for gas shale field assessment.

In this course log analysis for gas shale reservoirs will be demonstrated practically to estimate reservoir properties. Real gas shale field data will be used and attendees will practically learn to apply log data for shale reservoir evaluation.

Topics include:

1. Introduction to Gas Shale reservoirs

• Organic material in shale
• Total organic carbon (TOC) content
• Thermal maturity status
• Absorption isotherm data for gas shale analysis
• Porosity and pore geometry
• Compositional brittleness of shales

2. Gas Shale Log Analysis

• Well log response for gas shale
• Total organic carbon (TOC) content calculations
• Porosity estimation using different conventional logs
• Fluid saturation estimation
• Thermal maturity calculations
• Methods of permeability assessments
• Absorbed gas quantification
• Free gas quantification
• Total gas volumetric estimation
• Estimation of elastic rock mechanical properties and rock strength

Geologists, geophysicist, petrophysicist and reservoir engineers who want to improve their knowledge about gas shales.

Reza Rezaee, associate professor of Curtin’s Dept of Petroleum Engineering, has a PhD in reservoir characterization. He has over 25 years’ experience in academia. During his career he has been engaged in several research projects supported by national and international oil and gas companies. These commissions, together with his supervisory work at various universities, have involved a wide range of achievements. He has supervised over 60 MSc and PhD students during his university career to date. He has published more than 120 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers and is the author of 3 books on petroleum geology, logging and log interpretation.

Reza's research has been focused on integrated solutions for reservoir characterization, formation evaluation and petrophysics. He has utilized expert systems such as artificial neural networks and fuzzy logic and has introduced several new approaches to estimate rock properties from log data where conventional methods fail to succeed. Currently, he is focused on unconventional gas including gas shale and tight gas sand studies, and is the lead scientist for the WA:ERA (EIS) Tight Gas and Shale Gas research projects. He established Curtin University’s Unconventional Gas Research Group in 2010.

Reza is the project leader of Anlec R&C dynamic seal efficiency research project investigating cap rock sealing efficiency for CO2 sequestration in the Gippsland basin. Reza is the winner of Australian gas innovation award 2012 for his innovation on tight gas sand treatment for gas production enhancement.