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The chronological sample taker or core sample tool (CST) is a multishot gun that is lowered into the borehole on a wireline logging cable. At the appropriate sample depth, a 1-inch hollow bullet is fired horizontally into the borehole wall, and a core up to 2 inches long recovered ( Figure 1 , Sample taking operation of the sidewall gun). On a single run into the hole, combined guns can shoot up to 72 sidewall cores. In a very irregular, washed-out, overgauge hole, cores may be much shorter, or may even consist entirely of filter cake or drilling fluid-contaminated sediments. In very hard rock, the bullets may break on impact, fail to penetrate, or, if recovered, may contain only fractured or crushed material. Though, for a number of obvious reasons, sidewall cores are inferior to bottomhole cores, they are far more commonly cut. One reason is that they are cheap to obtain, requiring minimum rig time. More importantly, they are taken after the well has been drilled and logged and, therefore, are planned with the benefit of hindsight.
Core Recovery
On retrieval from the borehole, the sidewall core gun is taken to the wireline service company work area. Before any other work is attempted, the logging engineer should remove the explosive charges from all bullets that failed to fire. The successful bullets are then removed from the gun by cutting the wire fasteners. Extra care should be taken to keep the bullets in correct order after they have been removed from the gun! Each core is then extracted from the bullet into a labeled glass jar ( Figure 1 , Extraction of the sidewall core from the hollow bullet after removal from the gun). After the core is cut, the key to successful recovery is preparation. This means efficient and speedy completion of the various stages of recovery, boxing, sampling, geological evaluation, and shipping. If two geologists are present at the wellsite, e.g., an oil company geologist and a mud logging geologist, duties should be allocated between them so that they can work sequentially on each aspect of the job without getting in each other's way ( Figure 2 , Sequential core processing by two geologists working together). It is critical that the whole process be carried out in a disciplined manner.
References Asquith G.A. & Gibson C.R. (1983): Basic Well Log Analysis for Geologists Dresser Atlas (1982): Well Logging and Interpretation Techniques Krygowski D.A. (2003): Guide to Petrophysical Interpretation Rider, Malcolm (1996): The Geological Interpretation of Well Logs Schlumberger (1998): Log Interpretation Principles/Applications Shell Nigeria Graduate Training Programme: Petrophysics