Carbon resources

In conducting its activity in the field of carbon resources (oil, gas, coal), the Carbon Resources team combines approaches adopted by different Earth Science disciplines : sedimentology, structural geology, hydrogeology, geochemistry, petrophysics and modeling. Research is structured around three major issues related to the exploration and exploitation of these resources.

- Deposit environments: Recognizing environments that are favorable for the formation and preservation of source and reservoir rocks. This requires a thorough understanding of the paleo-environmental conditions and geodynamics that controlled the deposition of these formations in the Proterozoic and up to the present day.

- Nature and reactivity of organic matter: understanding the origin, nature and reactivity of sedimentary organic matter under different geological conditions. This issue concerns depositional environments, burial and thermal diagenesis and the formation of deposits.  Analyses of geological samples and experimental studies are conducted in order to identify the nature and reactivity of organics.

- Reservoir and transfer properties: determining the petrophysical characteristics of a reservoir, i.e. :

• linking the physical and petrographic characteristics, by focusing on storage properties (porosity) and transfer of fluids (permeability), heat (thermal conductivity) and mass;
• relating these characteristics to the processes that make up the geological history of a formation;
• connecting petrophysical characteristics to geophysical or log signals;
• developing spatio-temporal models of the geometry and dynamics of a reservoir.