COURSE OVERVIEW:

Unconventional reservoirs such as shale gas, tight oil, tight gas sands, and low-permeability carbonates have become a major component of global hydrocarbon production. Their complex pore systems, strong heterogeneity, organic content, and stress sensitivity make classical petrophysical approaches insufficient. This course provides a comprehensive and practical understanding of how to acquire, interpret, and integrate petrophysical data specifically for unconventional reservoirs.

The course starts with a clear comparison between conventional and unconventional systems, highlighting how depositional environment, mineralogy, pore structure, and organic matter fundamentally change the way petrophysicists must evaluate porosity, saturation, permeability, and mechanical properties. Participants will explore the full spectrum of data types: cores and special core analysis, open hole and cased hole logs, image logs, nuclear magnetic resonance, spectral logs, and laboratory rock physics measurements.

Special focus is placed on building robust petrophysical models for complex lithologies, including multimineral and probabilistic approaches, advanced saturation models, and permeability estimation in nano-Darcy systems. The course also addresses the critical link between petrophysics and geomechanics, including brittleness evaluation, stress profiling, and their role in hydraulic fracture design and completion optimization.

Throughout the course, participants will work through practical examples and case study-style discussions drawn from various unconventional plays. Emphasis is placed on how to manage uncertainty, apply quality control, and integrate petrophysical results with geoscience and reservoir engineering workflows to support field development planning and production optimization in unconventional assets.

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

After completion of the course, the participants will be able to:

• Distinguish clearly between conventional and unconventional reservoirs in terms of geology, rock physics, and flow behavior.
• Describe the main types of unconventional plays, including shale gas, tight oil, tight gas sands, and low-permeability carbonates.
• Explain how mineralogy, organic content, and pore structure influence petrophysical responses in unconventional rocks.
• Identify appropriate core acquisition strategies for unconventional reservoirs and specify required laboratory measurements.
• Interpret basic and advanced well logs in the context of unconventional reservoirs, including density, neutron, resistivity, sonic, and gamma ray.
• Utilize image logs and nuclear magnetic resonance logs to characterize fractures, textures, and pore size distributions.
• Build petrophysical models to estimate total and effective porosity in complex, organic-rich, and clay-rich formations.
• Apply suitable saturation models for unconventional reservoirs, recognizing the limitations of classical approaches developed for conventional systems.
• Estimate permeability in nano-Darcy to micro-Darcy regimes using petrophysical transforms, core data, and rock typing workflows.
• Evaluate brittleness, mechanical properties, and in situ stress indicators from petrophysical and logging data to support stimulation design.
• Integrate petrophysical outputs with geological models, geomechanical studies, and reservoir simulation frameworks for unconventional field development.
• Perform quality control and uncertainty analysis on petrophysical interpretations specially tailored for unconventional environments.
• Review and discuss real field case studies to recognize typical pitfalls and best practices in unconventional reservoir petrophysics.
• Formulate practical workflows and checklists for ongoing evaluation and development of unconventional assets in their own organizations.

TARGET AUDIENCE:

• Reservoir engineers involved in unconventional field development
• Petrophysicists and log analysts working on shale, tight oil, or tight gas assets
• Geoscientists and geologists engaged in reservoir characterization of unconventional plays
• Production engineers involved in stimulation and completion optimization
• Geomechanics specialists requiring better use of petrophysical data
• Field development planners and asset managers for unconventional projects
• Technical staff from national and international oil and gas companies
• Professionals from service companies providing logging and core analysis
• Data scientists and petrotechnical professionals supporting petrophysical workflows
• Technical decision makers seeking to understand risks and uncertainties in unconventional evaluations

TRAINING COURSE METHODOLOGY:

A highly interactive combination of lectures, discussion sessions, and case studies will be employed to maximise the transfer of information, knowledge, and experience. The course will be intensive, practical, and highly interactive. The sessions will start by raising the most relevant questions and motivating everybody to find the right answers. The attendants will also be encouraged to raise more of their questions and to share in developing the right answers using their analysis and experience. There will also be some indoor experiential activities to enhance the learning experience. Course material will be provided in PowerPoint, with necessary animations, learning videos, and general discussions.

The course participants shall be evaluated before, during, and after the course.

COURSE CERTIFICATE:

National Consultant Centre for Training LLC (NCC) will issue an Attendance Certificate to all participants who complete at least 80% of the total attendance time requirement.