Ask the average person what an oil or

gas reservoir looks like and there's a good chance that they'll tell
you it's a underground cavern filled with oil and gas. Reservoir actually looks
like this. It consists of one or more layers of sedimentary rocks
which themselves can be made up of thinner beds of sediment that are
partially saturated with oil and or gas. The maximum amount of oil, and or gas,
a reservoir can hold is determined by its porosity, which the fraction of open
space or pore space in the rock. The quality of a reservoir is also
determined by its permeability. This is a measure of the connectivity
between the pore spaces and thus reflects the ease or difficulty of extracting
oil and or gas from the reservoir. A desirable reservoir rock then is
one that has lots of pore space or high porosity and allows for oil and
or gas to easily pass through it and thus has high permeability. Here are examples
of three
common types of reservoir rocks. The sandstone, made of sand grains. The limestone
made up of shell material. And shale made up of silt and clay,
which are very fine grain sediments. The shale also contains organic matter,
which is why it's black. The sandstone and
the limestone are conventional reservoir rocks in that they have both good
porosity and good permeability. This can be demonstrated simply by
pouring water on the two rocks. In both cases, the water is
quickly absorbed into the rock. The shale, on the other hand,
is an unconventional reservoir rock. That's because the shale
has poor permeability. Again, this can be demonstrated
with a simple water pour. Note that the water fails
to penetrate the shale and instead just beads up
on the shale's surface. The differences in porosity and permeability between the
three rock types
can be directly observed by looking at thin shavings or thin sections of
the three rocks under a microscope. This, for example,
is a thin section of sandstone. The blue areas in the thin section
are pore spaces between the individual sediment grains. Note how much of this slide
is blue
indicating that the sandstone has high porosity, and note also the good
connectivity between the pore spaces which indicates that the sandstone
has high permeability. High porosity and high permeability can also be seen in this
thin section of a limestone, much of which is made up of fossilized shells of
ancient microscopic marine organisms. Finally, here's a thin section
of an organic rich shale. In this case the white
spots are pore spaces, while the remainder are grains of silt and
clay. Note that while there's a decent amount of
porosity in the rock, there's no apparent connectivity between the pores,
indicating little if any permeability. This lack of permeability is due to the
flatter shape of the silt and clay grades, which being packed tightly together
like stacked plates allow for little connectivity
between the pore spaces. Which raises an interesting question. If a shale reservoir
has good porosity but
poor permeability, how did oil and or gas get into the shale
pore spaces in the first place? The answer is that the oil and gas were released
from organic matter in
the shale and moved into the pore spaces. So when you hear about shale oil and
shale
gas being an unconventional reservoir, it's because shale has
such low permeability. However shale oil and shale gas are also
unconventional in that the shale reservoir rock also doubles as the source
rock for shale oil and shale gas.