By Mella McEwen

Oil Editor

Buildings around the Permian Basin are filled with cores and cuttings, many decades old. Geoscientists will occasionally review the cores and cuttings in search of overlooked pays.

Now technology is allowing for examination of that data in close detail from the comfort of a home or office.

Christopher Prince, vice president, information technology with PTS Laboratories in Houston, recently traveled to Midland to discuss advanced imaging technology he has helped develop. He agreed that core analysis can be a foundation for developing new production from overlooked zones.

"This is why we put this together," he said. "It preserves the core in a pristine state but in high enough resolution where you can do work."

One use of what he calls TenEx or ten-times magnification, is net pay calculations, allowing operators to figure what proportion of "this mass of stuff you've drilled through is pay."

Users can also take advantage of the technology's microscopic capabilities to perform grain-size analysis to create grain size logs or permeability logs, Prince said.

He noted that he wrote the code and helped develop the machinery, which he described as a custom petrographic microscope, essentially a robot with a camera that scans the core into digital form.

Prince noted that his research has other uses, such as in the health field. He gleefully pulled up a slide of a small intestine on his laptop computer, using the microscopic capabilities to zoom in on cellular levels and pan around the slide.

PTS Labs, founded in 1964, offers core analysis service to domestic and international energy companies and has customers in the Permian Basin. Prince said that, while he is not as familiar with cores from Permian Basin wells, he is familiar with how fragile cores can be.

"The samples we deal with are rock, and no one thinks they're this way, but rock can be fragile considering it's brought up from deep underground into a new environment," he said. He cited his experience in Angola making images of cores from Angolan oil wells. He noted that he left a core overnight "and by the next morning when I returned, it had grown salt hairs."

In Nigeria to digitize cores, he said he digitized one core while waiting for another worker to do core descriptions. When he returned four months later to do a second core, "this guy had come in from London and was describing both cores. What he was looking at (on the first core) bore little resemblance to what I had seen."

The images scanned by his system never change, he said, and allows one person to write core descriptions from their desktop "regardless of where the core is. It can be standalone or we have a virtual layout room on our web site."

Not only can samples be incredibly fragile, he pointed out, but expensive. "Some of the big cores coming out of the Gulf of Mexico can cost $10 million. You might as well preserve them," he said.

Mella McEwen can be reached at