LAUSR

Recent advances in imaging technologies have allowed us to interrogate materials at progressively higher resolutions over larger areas or volumes of sample. As we have begun to investigate geomaterials at resolutions on the single nanometer scale, our observations have upended several long-lived paradigms of geoscience. This has proved particularly true in shale reservoirs. Although it is fascinating to continue to look more deeply into these reservoirs, we are also faced with three daunting challenges. The first involves development of standard protocols for imaging. As we push the limits of our imaging tools, the details of sample preparation, the composition and thickness of conductive coatings, the configuration of the electron column, the excitation voltage and choice of electron signal to use for imaging, and the preand post-processing of image data all influence the results of our analyses. The second challenge involves the processing of extremely large volumes of image data. Individual images can be larger than 100 gigabytes in size, too large for many of the existing tools for image analysis to open and segment. The third challenge, involves the upscaling of our observations from the nanometer scale of the pore space to the vertical thickness of the formation (hundreds of meters) and the basin scale (hundreds of kilometers). This paper presents an evaluation of how the details of sample preparation, image acquisition, and image processing influence the results of porosity and Total Organic Carbon (TOC) analysis from SEM image data in shale reservoirs.