Last night Alex Finlay from Chemostrat talked to a crowded group of geoscientists at our April Cluster meeting. 

Based on the recent announcement by Hurricane Oil about their West of Shetlands discovery, Alex’s talk was very opportune. Alex explained the role Chemostrat play in the exploration arena where they perform correlations or differentiation of sedimentary rock successions based on stratigraphic variations in their elemental geochemical data. Alex showed lots of sections of wells including in the West of Shetland and Rockall basins, comparing electric logs such as gamma ray against lithology mud logs and then against their detailed elemental analyses.

Their data modelling for each major basin gives them the opportunity to perform provenance analysis providing information on the sediment, enabling the reconstruction of the origin of the sediment, in terms of lithology and age of the geological terrains.

All this was of significant interest to the group and it became more so when Alex explained that they now offer crews to be at the wellsite with a portable XRF machine to supply much faster analyses.

It was good to see a higher proportion of younger geologists in the crowd this time, compared to some of our prior meetings. Hopefully this trend will continue.

It is hoped Alex will be able to supply a summary set of slides from this recent work which will be loaded onto the website on this page, please check back later.

The Abstract and Bio for the presentation given by Alex Finlay  are  HERE