Collaborations

This state-of-the-art laboratory is equipped with experimental and modeling facilities to carry out integrated reservoir characterization of conventional and unconventional earth energy resources. The laboratory is capable of carrying out multiphysics and multiscale investigations for creating lab scale models and upscale them for field applications of petrophysical properties, rock physics (elastic and viscoelastic) properties, geomechanical properties, and conductivity properties of the rocks and minerals at varying pressure, temperature, frequencies, and hydrological conditions. It can simulate the earth’s subsurface conditions for the high temperature and high-pressure resources, geothermal reservoirs, and gas hydrates, in addition to handling the routine challenges of exploration for clastics, carbonates, organic-rich shales (ORS), and the basement formations. The lab is also capable of actively pursuing carbon utilization and sequestration (CUS) research, which is the need of the hour for all countries.

Established through the combined resources from ONGC Ltd. and IIT Roorkee, the laboratory hosts a number of facilities such as low-frequency equipment (0.1 to 3000 Hz), pseudo triaxial setup,  benchtop ultrasonic setup (~1 MHz), ultrasonic transducer manufacturing setup, cation exchange capacity (CEC) setup, and the spectral induced polarization (1 mHz to 45 KHz) setup. This is the only facility in India and perhaps the South-Asia Pacific region (except China in one place) to obtain seismic strain responses of the earth material up to the order of ~1E-07 while the formation samples are being treated with different saturants and saturations under varying confining and pore pressures. This laboratory is also equipped to carry out quantitative mineral analysis in a multi-mineral rock using XRD spectra, and Digital Rock Physics (DRP) to look at the distribution of pores and pore-networks in all rock types and model flow through them.