Date of Award

January 2019

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Petroleum Engineering

First Advisor

Mehdi Ostadhassan

Abstract

In order to assess a source rock for economical exploitation purposes, many parameters should be considered. Regarding the geochemical aspects, the most important ones are amount of organic matter (OM) and its quality. Quality refers to thermal maturity level and the nature of the OM from which it was formed that affect the ability of oil and gas generation. Vitrinite reflectance and programed pyrolysis such as Rock-Eval (RE) are common methods for such analysis.

However, vitrinite is not always present in sediments and RE is providing bulk properties. Moreover, the increase in exploration and production of unconventional reservoirs and their complexity has led to the employment of new methods for resource-play assessment, such as Raman spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR).

In the present dissertation, two mentioned analytical methods of Raman spectroscopy and Hydrogen NMR were utilized for fine scale studying of organic matter and individual macerals to show the potential of such methods in thermal maturity level detection, prediction of elastic properties, structural evolution, and heterogeneity of organic matter.

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