Baker Hughes announced today that it has signed an exclusive agreement with CGG for RoqSCAN™ technology offered by CGG. RoqSCAN is a real-time, fully portable, quantitative and automated rock properties and mineralogical analyzer. Developed by Robertson, a CGG company, and Carl Zeiss Microscopy Ltd., RoqSCAN delivers highly quantitative compositional and textural mineralogical data from drilling cuttings or core pieces, revealing the mineralogical DNA of the reservoir. This service can be provided at the wellsite during drilling operations, or later in core stores, field offices and laboratories.

Baker Hughes will include RoqSCAN in its shale reservoir evaluation services as part of the Shale Science Alliance with CGG. The agreement further strengthens the strategic relationship between the two companies, which is designed to help operators better understand shale plays and predict "sweet spots" based on the combination of seismic attributes and accurate wellbore measurements.

"RoqSCAN is the latest addition to a suite of reservoir characterization services offered by Baker Hughes," said Derek Mathieson, Vice President, Strategy and Corporate Development for Baker Hughes. "The data provided by RoqSCAN significantly improves the real-time evaluation of laterals, thereby allowing operators to deploy more efficient and effective completion strategies."

"RoqSCAN acts as an innovative bridge, delivering important geologic information to our integrated geoscience offering with Baker Hughes and providing a ground truth for our predictive reservoir models. It allows us to properly characterize the geological factors behind the sweet spots and optimize the completion design and fracturing to maximize production and reduce costs in these capital-intensive shale play operations. This exclusive agreement strengthens our ties with Baker Hughes and offers an exciting opportunity to demonstrate the value of RoqSCAN and the benefits of our Shale Science Alliance to the industry," said Sophie Zurquiyah, Senior Executive Vice President of CGG's Geology, Geophysics & Reservoir Division (GGR).