Putting rocks in medical scanners may help the search for oil and gas

Prospecting for oil
Grains of truth

Jul 30th 2011 | Houston, Texas | from the print edition 

STRIKING oil is one thing. Getting it out of the ground in economic quantities is quite another. Doing so depends on understanding the granular structure of the rock it is trapped in, and analysing that is a tedious business of placing countless samples in pressure vessels to assess their capacity to hold hydrocarbons and to estimate the flow rate of those hydrocarbons through them. This can take years.
Help, though, is at hand. Computerised tomography (CT) scanning has been used in medicine for several decades. Now it is being applied to geology. In alliance with electron microscopy, the geological use of CT scanning has given birth to a new field, digital rock physics. The field’s proponents believe it will let oil companies decide far more quickly than they could in the past which strikes are worth exploiting, and which should be abandoned.

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