Chemostrat
About Chemostrat
Founded in 1990 by Tim Pearce and Ken Ratcliffe, the company's main aim was to provide a professional, petroleum industry-orientated chemostratigraphic service. Over the past 17 years Chemostrat have built an unrivalled understanding of analytical technology and interpretation of geochemical datasets. Our key staff have a strong research record in the fields of sedimentary geochemistry, modern stratigraphic methodologies and sediment provenance, allowing us to develop a complete chemostratigraphy service from laboratory to wellsite.
Chemostrat has completed projects worldwide for many of the major oil companies, placing us at the forefront of the chemostratigraphy market. Our project work illustrates the versatility of chemostratigraphy, with the technique being successfully implemented through the geological record (Pre-Cambrian to Paleocene) and, a variety of environments (sabhka through to deep marine turbidites). Our recent research also allows us to use the technique in carbonate environments, coal-methane beds and volcaniclastic sequences.
The cornerstone of our work remains characterisation and correlation projects using ICP-OES/MS and XRF analyses. However, reflecting our in-house capabilities we also a full range of mineralogical and sedimentological correlation tools. By combining these techniques with an ICP option, we are able to supply a solution to almost any correlation problem and therefore posses the resources to provide an integrated stratigraphic service to the petroleum industry.
The success of the Chemostrat in the UK led to the formation of our wholly owned subsidiary, Chemostrat Inc. in 2000 . Based in Houston our offices and XRF/XRD labs are ideally placed to service the North American market place. Also during this time Chemostrat, in association with Halliburton Energy Services (HES), developed instrumentation capable of being placed at well-site to provide reliable real-time elemental data comparable to that obtain from laboratory ICP OES. The real-time chemostratigraphy service (branded LaserStrat ® ) is offered in association with Sperry-Sun product service line (a Halliburton Company).
In 2001 the LaserStrat ® service successfully completed its first job in the North Sea successfully picking a critical pre-reservoir casing point in 4 out of 4 wells. Since then this service has gone from strength to strength being further commissioned to provide geosteering and casing point calls in the North Sea which still continues. Outside the UK LaserStrat ® has been used in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin to help tag the optimum porosity zone within a carbonate reef reservoir setting, and is currently being used for geosteering in the Middle East and Alaska .
More recently, we have expanded our head office in Welshpool and invested in new laboratory facilities, fully equipped with state of the art ICP, WD-XRF and ED-XRF equipment to both enhance our analytical capabilities and remain cost-effective for our customers.