HyLogging unconventional petroleum core from the Cooper Basin, South Australia

The Cooper Basin is currently Australia's premier onshore hydrocarbon-producing province and hosts a range of unconventional gas play types, including the very extensive basin-centred and tight gas accumulations in the Gidgealpa Group, both shallow and deep dry coal seam gas associated with the Patchawarra and Toolachee formations, as well as the shale gas plays in the Murteree and Roseneath shales. Characterisation of mineralogical properties of shales is critical to hydraulic fracture design and development of unconventional hydrocarbon resources. Properties are sensitive to variations in mineralogy, especially clays, and historically, acquisition of a suite of rock mechanics analyses has been on a point-source basis rather than on a continuous sampling approach, which is uncommon. In this paper, a near-continuous 382 m cored section, comprising the lower Permian Daralingie Formation, Roseneath and Murteree shales, the Epsilon Formation and the top portion of the Patchawarra Formation from Holdfast-1 well (DH261958) in the southern Cooper Basin, was measured using robotic core scanning spectroscopy with automated mineral identification. HyLogger 3 incorporates visible, near infrared, shortwave infrared and thermal infrared hyperspectral measurements recorded every 0.8 cm along the core at the rate of approximately 1 m per minute. These data are co-registered with a high-resolution image and a laser profile of the core. X-ray diffraction and thin-section petrology from the Holdfast-1 well-completion report (Beach Energy, 2011) provided relative proportions of minerals including quartz, kaolinite, dickite, muscovite, illite, chlorite and siderite that enabled the modelled <i>vs</i> actual mineralogies to be constrained in the thermal infrared with a correlation coefficient of 0.85 for quartz, 0.79 for muscovite and 0.68 for kaolin; illite and siderite were more poorly correlated. HyLogger logging, when integrated with other petrophysical and analytical core data, provides a useful tool to better understand unconventional reservoirs and may assist in identification of zones that are conducive to fracture stimulation.