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The IU Shale Research Consortium was founded to provide sustained funding for the operation of the IU Shale Research Lab and its facilities, and support for ongoing shale research and shale related student research. Pre-Pandemic Sponsors were Anadarko, ExxonMobil, Marathon, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Wintershall, Whiting, and Statoil. Current Sponsors are Exxonmobil and Chevron, we are in the process of rebuilding. There is an ongoing "Boom" of shale gas and oil exploration in the US and overseas, but a severe shortage of highly trained professionals that can fill the unique needs experienced by shale gas exploration and production. Our research program is focused on a fundamental understanding of how muds are deposited, and how they become shales and mudstones in the course of diagenesis and burial. The results of our research are of interest to academic research into "deep time" geologic processes and the resulting rock record, climate research, and reconstruction of past worlds, and also to industry geologists that use our results to evaluate environments of deposition, basinwide shale distribution, and variability of shale properties. The IU Shale Research Lab is a unique facility that combines high end petrographic capabilities (light microscopy, Field Emission Analytical SEM, Ion Milling Lab), the only flume lab that was designed to study depositional processes of muds, a long track record of benchmark research results, and 30 years of experience in shale research. We also have on campus access to a state of the art stable isotope (S, O, N, H) and metal isotope lab, a high end cryo-TEM, and a new focused ion beam (FIB) instrument. The current efforts to extract natural gas and oil from shale successions require long term efforts of excellence in shale and shale gas research, coupled with top-notch training of the next generation of geoscience professionals. Sponsorship of the IU Shale Research Lab provides industry with access to cutting edge shale research, and helps to turn out the most comprehensively trained shale-focused geoscientists available. A research prospectus can be downloaded from this link: IU Shale Research Prospectus 2014.
The Menu Bar near the top of this page (Annual Report, Field Trips, etc.) links
to "consortium only" information. The files are encrypted and require a password
for opening. A large amount of publicly available information from past years of
research is available at the IU Shale Research web site:
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Dr. Juergen Schieber Department of Geological Sciences Indiana University 1001 East 10th Street Bloomington, IN 47405-1405 |
Phone 812-855-5322 Fax 812-855-7899 E-mail:  (image, not a direct e-mail link) |
Copyright 2010-2024 Juergen Schieber |
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