Modern Carbonate Depositional Environments of Abu Dhabi, UAE

Course Details

Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates is the prime location for the study of arid carbonate ramps and one of the field-areas for Dr. Jaffri’s dissertation work. Thanks to Chris Kendall, who has devoted his career to enhancing our understanding of depositional processes along the Trucial Coast, Abu Dhabi has become the industry-standard for modern carbonate ramp studies. This 1-day field trip is offered in conjunction with a 4-day class room course on Carbonate Reservoirs. The field trip includes a transect through facies belts including dune fields, supratidal sabkha, intertidal cyanobacterial mats, and subtidal ooid grain shoals deposited in a wide range of nearshore environments. We will use a boat to investigate sub-tidal sand shoals and discuss the reservoir quality, distribution and primary dolomitization that occurs along carbonate ramps. If you work on the Permian Basin or the Tertiary carbonate reservoirs of Southeast Asia we recommend you take our field trip that focuses on rimmed attached platforms.

Due to the limit of participants we can have on the boat at one-time we strongly urge you to register for this course as soon as possible.

Who Should Attend

• Geologists
• Geophysicists
• Petrophysicists
• Engineers

This course is meant for oil and gas professionals in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Iran who would like to develop a thorough understanding of carbonate reservoir distribution and quality. 

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    Course Outline

    8:00 am – We will be gathering at the hotel meeting room for a safety briefing and orientation to the field area.

    9:00 am – We will gather at the hotel lobby and take ground transportation to the harbor.

    10:00 am – We will head out on boat through ooid-filled tidal inlets and examine changing facies from landwards to basinwards, including the famous ebb deltas of Abu Dhabi

    11:00 am – 12:00 pm – We will spend time examining carbonate eolianites, and the development of shoreface profiles along the seaward margins of the characteristic T-shaped islands that line the Abu Dhabi coastline. We will then return to Abu Dhabi and load in vehicles to visit the field area

    1:00 -2:00 pm After having lunch we will examine sedimentary structures in beach-perpendicular trenches

    2:30 – 3:00 pm We will walk in a transect across the sabkha to examine lithological changes and the interplay between carbonate and evaporite precipitation and discuss dolomitization mechanisms

    3:00 – 3:30 pm We will head back towards the hotel in Abu Dhabi.

    This field trip is scheduled by our UK-based partner GTC and can be offered as a 3-day version as well. Please contact us and we can get registration details for you.

    Our location

    Our headquarters are twenty minutes away from downtown Denver and half an hour from the largest core facility in the United States. Or field office in Ouray allows us quick access to world-class outcrops in Utah and New Mexico.

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