Assessment of Unconventional Fossil Fuel Systems

The increasing global demand for energy has made it imperative to explore and exploit unconventional oil and gas resources. An investigation of new resources has become mandatory for countries like Türkiye with very limited supplies of conventional oil and natural gas. In this context, investigation of unconventional resources are becoming more important. Unconventional sources are hydrocarbon (oil and natural gas) sources, but they are a set of energy sources separated from other conventional deposits due to differences in formation, occurrence, or production. Many shale basins ranging from Cambrian to Tertiary are broadly distributed in global scale. Extensive studies on shales have been carried out in recent years in order to comprehensively understand pore networks of tight reservoirs. For a successful hydrocarbon play, a proper understanding of the petrophysical characteristics of tight unconventional reservoirs at the nanoscale is essential.

Assist. Prof. Zeynep Döner and Prof. Dr. Mustafa Kumral from the Department of Geological Engineering have examined Silurian mudstones in central Taurides and western Pontides in Türkiye. In that study they fully revealed the gas system characteristics of studied source rocks for the first time.  Herewith, the evaluation of these rocks in terms of shale gas potential in our country contributes to the world statistics of unconventional gas resources discovered. They newly focus on evaluating the shale gas/oil system characteristics of shale source rocks with different thermal maturity levels in Türkiye by establishing a theoretical framework for shale plays evaluation, discuss the content of each property of shale play, and finally reveal its effectiveness, and scientific utilization. The studied source rocks are Lower Cretaceous-aged mudstones in western Pontides and Triassic-aged mudstones in western Taurides. In this study, it is aimed to determine the effect of thermal maturity on storage capacity. 
The research is carried out within the scope of an international collaboration with Prof. Dr. Qinhong Hu (The University of Texas at Arlington in Texas, USA), Prof. Dr. Shengyu Yang (China University of Petroleum, East China), and Dr. Qiming Wang (China University of Petroleum, East China).

The present research can be used as a model for reintroducing abandoned areas to the economy by investigating areas that have been reported with no hydrocarbon production potential in previous studies or that have not yet been explored using an unconventional point of view.

Analytical techniques used to characterize unconventional reservoir properties affecting fluid storage and flow from very large (field) to very small (nano) scale (modified from Bustin et al., 2008).