Within the oil and gas industry, exploration and production (E&P) is the early stage of energy production, which includes searching and extracting oil and gas. Solintec is a Brazilian company with 30 years of experience providing services to E&P companies, including management of subsurface samples and characterization of rocks and fluids.
Solintec has provided analytical microscopy analyses to customers using ZEISS Axio Imager 2 light microscopes for conventional petrographic descriptions of samples. In conversations with their customers, Solintec’s leadership identified a business opportunity in the local market. Digitization of thin sections of rock was currently outsourced to companies outside Brazil, who would send their professionals and their equipment to carry out the work on-site. However, these services were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies working in Brazil were subsequently forced to ship their samples to distant labs for remote analysis.
To fill this market need locally, Solintec acquired the ZEISS Axioscan automated microscope which enabled them to offer petrographic rock characterization and digitization services.
Our laboratory has a good variety of microscopes, but with the arrival of ZEISS Axioscan, our petrography services expanded and began to meet a need in the national market – which is digitization.
Felix Thadeu Teixeira Gonçalves, Business Development Director at Solintec
Since the company started offering the service in November 2020, the demand has been continuously growing. For Gonçalves, it is a new line of revenue within a traditional area: “For now we are exploring the digitization part. This means turning the blade into a file that can be accessed by anyone anywhere in the world using ZEISS software. This is already generating demand for the project and service.“
Examples of petrographic images acquires with ZEISS Axioscan by Solintec. Image 1: Carbonate rock – spherulite (pre-salt reservoir) acquired with polarized microscopy. Image 2: Clastic rock – eolian-fluvial sandstone (Sergipe-Alagoas Basin Reservoir) acquired with polarized microscopy. Image 3: Clastic rock – eolian-fluvial sandstone (Sergipe-Alagoas Basin Reservoir) acquired with brightfield microscopy.
Leonardo Morejano Halfen, geologist and coordinator responsible for Solintec’s petrography laboratory, analyzing a pre-salt slide at ZEISS Axioscan.
Solintec intends to explore further possibilities with Axioscan. One area under review is to incorporate Artificial Intelligence with ZEISS Intellesis to speed up and automate the description process of petrography samples. This includes point counting, phase distributions and other qualitative descriptions. With the large amount of data generated with Axioscan’s incredible throughput, these analyses are not possible with manual methods.