May Luncheon

Please RSVP by 3:00pm on Friday, May 17, 2024.

Reservations made after the deadline will incur an additional fee of $10.

LOCATION: In-Person luncheon meeting will be held at the Bush Convention Center. Virtual meeting on Zoom. 

TOPIC: Clay mineralogy interpretation and quantification using XRD techniques  – importance from the perspective of unconventional oil and gas operations.

ABSTRACT: Clay minerals are the major constituent of fine-grained sediments  and rocks. They began to be widely used in the oil and gas industry as a  tool for depositional environment determination or stratigraphic  correlation to find exploration target interval. Clay minerals also  started to be studied for diagenesis and reservoir  quality prediction mainly using petrological analysis and quantitative  mineralogical analysis by X-ray diffraction. Their accurate  identification and quantification therefore became essential for the  evaluation of both conventional and unconventional reservoirs,  as clay minerals strongly influence their physical and chemical  properties. Yet, the practice remains challenging due to the unique  structures and various element compositions of clay minerals.

Case  studies and examples will be presented highlighting the importance of  accurate  clay mineralogy interpretation and quantification in oil and gas  operations from several point of views: burial and thermal history, to  investigate matrix density and reservoir quality prediction, or at a  reservoir scale to confirm geochemical data quality  for mineral models' evaluation.

BIO: Giovanni Zanoni joined RohmTek in November 2023 as Sr. Technical Advisor  and XRD analyst. Giovanni oversees X-ray  Diffraction operations at RohmTek and provides his expertise in clay  mineralogy. Prior to joining RohmTek, he contributed to creating a  brand-new Clay Mineralogy Laboratory at Texas Tech University (Lubbock,  TX), where  he was the primary XRD analyst from 2018. He collaborated in various  research projects leading to several scientific publications involving  clay mineralogy. He then joined the industry in 2021 as a Mineralogist  and XRD analyst for Premier Corex where he worked  on over 600 projects and 6000 samples.

Giovanni grew up in Switzerland where he received a Bachelor’s and Master's  degree in  Earth and Environmental Sciences from the University of Geneva  (Switzerland). He will be defending his doctoral research on shale  diagenesis from TTU in 2024.