Oil shales’ THz anisotropy and imaging

Oil shales are sedimentary rocks that could be used as seal rocks, waste storage and unconventional hydrocarbon sources. Obtaining their petrophysical characteristics is necessary to assess whether they are worth exploiting. Therefore, given that anisotropy is linked to petrophysical properties, their characterization is of great importance. Hence, we propose here to study the terahertz anisotropy of an oil shale. This last is partly related to the organic matter content, which is link to the oil yield. Moreover, we made two Terahertz images of the same sample, obtained by changing the polarization of the electric field by 90° between them. Differences show new and complementary information about the sample.