Name : Muhammad Rizqy Septyandy

Class : Journal Writing

Task

: Synthesizing

Determination of the prospects for shale gas exploration requires some parameters. One of
the parameters that is often used is to use the value of total organic carbon (TOC). A case
study for the use of the TOC values for shale gas prospects are Bowland Shale Formation
evaluation. The Bowland Shale Formation consists of mudstone and turibidite lithofacies
reflecting a pronounced sea level controlled cyclicity. High TOC contents and large
thicknesses of the mudstone lithofacies show that the Bowland Shale Formation holds a
significant shale gas/liquid potential in areas with appropriate maturity (Gross et al., 2015). In
addition to TOC, several other parameters that can be used is methane adsorption, and
organic porosity in a simulation basin model (Romero-Sarmiento et al., 2013). Some
companies and researchers looking for the TOC parameter, usually done through a process of
analysis of Rock-Eval pyrolysis. This analysis is often referred to as geochemical analysis.
The weakness of this method is that the price is relatively expensive and not be carried out on
wells that do not have a core data. The method offers a quantitative method for determining
the value of TOC without using geochemical analysis. There are two ways for this
quantitative method. First, Total organic carbon (TOC) content from well log data can be
predicted by classification set of electrofacies (EF). This classification called Hierarchical
Cluster Analysis (HCA) and K-means clustering to characterize and identify electrofacies
(Sfidari et al., 2012). Second, TOC content is affected by logging data in a source rock
(density, sonic, neutron and resistivity logs) using neuro fuzzy. A source rock interval poses
to less density, lower velocity, higher sonic porosity, higher gamma ray values and increase
in resistivity (Khoshnoodkia, et al., 2011).