About Us Weatherford Laboratories - Instruments Division design engineers have more than 20 years of experience maintaining and repairing pyrolysis instruments for clients located all over the world. When they set-out in 1998 to design a new and better pyrolysis instrument, they had a wealth of experience to draw on. The result was the Weatherford Laboratories Instruments Source Rock Analyzer™ (SRA).

The SRA was designed to help identify and characterize source rock and reservoir rock by heating geologic samples (i.e. outcrops, cuttings, conventional cores and sidewall cores) to a programmed temperature in an inert atmosphere. The Source Rock Analyzer™ (SRA) quantitatively determines the amount of free hydrocarbons (S1) and the amount of hydrocarbons generated through thermal cracking of nonvolatile organic matter (S2) using a Flame Ionization Detector (FID). The amount of CO2 produced during pyrolysis of kerogen (S3) is determined using an IR detector. The SRA also determines the temperature at which the maximum release of hydrocarbons from cracking of kerogen occurs during pyrolysis (Tmax) and Total Organic Carbon (TOC). The SRA can be used on-site or in a laboratory environment for evaluating organic richness, kerogen type, thermal maturity, generative potential of a zone, or to identify oil or gas producing zones.