Sample Preparation

Perhaps not the most technological or glamorous part of what we do but in our opinion a vital part of providing clients with top quality data they can rely on!

SWC and Cores

SWC samples are expensive to obtain, at the very best quite small (up to about 25mm, often much smaller) and need to be handled carefully and sparingly. Fortunately petroleum geochemical analyses in the main require little material. SWC samples should be cleaned if necessary (removing drilling mud) and any other obvious contaminants and the minimum amount of material cut or scrapped from the core whilst striving to maintain the core integrity. It is very useful if clients can indicate at the onset all analyses expected on the SWC samples such that only one, careful, subsampling is necessary and enough material is gathered at the outset.

Core samples may be in the form of core chips or core plugs. Both of these are precious materials but especially the core plugs. With cores it is important to look for evidence of invasion from drilling fluids or plugging fluids and aim to avoid areas affected or remove obvious contamination. Information from clients on drilling fluids and plugging fluids is important for how we treat the samples and the final quality/interpretation of generated data.

Oils and Gases

In the main we can deal with oils that have been stored in most types of approved or emergency containers. Volumes are usually not a problem, depending on the total suite of analyses required, although at least 2ml is preferred. In general oils require no preparation for the basic analytical procedures, some of which in themselves are in part or in whole preparation for more advanced analyses.

Gas samples may come in isotubes, isojars, cans, vacutainers, sealed bags, pressurised or non pressurised metal containers. If pressurised vessels are used information on pressures is important. At APT we can deal with all of these gas sample containers.