Recent Advances in Borehole Geophysics in Unconventional Resources: Applications, Techniques and Challenges

More percentage of new productions in oil industry is from unconventional oil and gas such as oil shale, tar sand, laminated sand, tight oil (siltstone), tight gas, gas hydrate, and igneous rock, because the conventional oil and gas can no longer meet the need of the world. Researchers in response pay more attentions to the unconventional resources. Formation properties such as total organic carbon (TOC), porosity, permeability and saturation are critical for exploration and development of the unconventional reservoirs. Recent developments in wire-line methods to determine these properties have led to the completion and production strategies based on those mentioned properties. Logging-WhileDrilling measurements have the capability of determining some of these properties in real-time, so that completion decisions can be made rapidly and wells can be steered using the real-time data [1].