Identification of thermal maturity-relevant organic matter in Shale Working Group Report 2021

The Identification of Thermal Maturity-Relevant Organic Matter in Shale Working Group of the ICCP was established in 2008 to provide guidelines for identifying and measuring the reflectance of the population of dispersed organic matter that is relevant to thermal maturity determination. Information products published by the working group include ASTM D7708 Standard Test Method for Microscopical Determination of the Reflectance of Vitrinite Dispersed in Sedimentary Rocks (ASTM, 2014) and two interlaboratory studies (ILS) to determine precision statistics for this ASTM test method (Hackley et al., 2015, 2020). Poor reproducibility of solid bitumen and vitrinite reflectance measurements in the second ILS (Hackley et al., 2020) suggested that further work is required to standardize the identification of thermal maturity-relevant dispersed organic matter for reproducible reflectance measurements. Thus, at the 2019 ICCP meeting in The Hague, Netherlands, the working group decided to pursue additional ILS via image-based approaches to improve reproducibility.