Book Cliffs Field Trip

Course Details

Based on popular demand from industry professionals who wish to get a general overview of the most common reservoir types that occur in coastal plain and shallow marine settings, we have collected a series of spectacular outcrops for you to visit.

The field-trip is structured such that we will begin on the coastal plain where you will get to see high-sinuosity channels and point bars. We then take you to the sequence boundary that separates the terrestrial coastal plain from the shorefaces below. After spending time on shorefaces and wave dominated deltas we will move on to tide and river dominated deltas. The last part of the trip focuses on transgressive systems such as estuaries, associated tidal bars, inlets, and barrier islands.

Participants will spend time collecting data and plotting Gamma Ray logs through these reservoir types such that they can identify similar environments of deposition in their own log data.

This field trip is geared mainly for shallow marine clastic reservoirs. If you would like to focus more on fluvial systems click here.

Who Should Attend

• Geologists
• Geophysicists
• Petrophysicists
• Engineers

The course is designed for geoscientists and reservoir engineers who primarily focus on fluvial and shallow marine successions, especially those involved in building or updating geomodels. Whether your task involves a simple well-correlation across tidal systems, or the input of fluvial channel dimensions into a geomodel this course will benefit you in several ways.

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Course Outline

Day 1

Arrival at Grand Junction Regional Airport

We will be picking you up at Grand Junction Regional Airport an driving you to your hotel (which we will not only book for you, but will pay for as well).

Day 2

We will be gathering at the hotel meeting room for safety briefing, orientation, and classroom lectures on sequence stratigraphy and sedimentology of shallow marine siliciclastics.

We will be heading into some canyons about 20 minutes away from the hotel and spend the day looking at a Cretaceous coastal plain succession. The key point will be identifying both reservoir and non-reservoir facies associations in such settings and discussing models that explain alluvial architecture (there’s a few out and not all of them work!)

Day 3

We will be meeting at 9:00 am in the hotel for lectures on shorefaces and wave dominated deltas.

Fieldwork for the day will include comparing and contrasting sharp vs gradational-based shorefaces, deltaic vs shoreface parasequences, and discussing net:gross changes along a clastic shelf.

We will then visit the Colorado National Monument en route to Green River, Utah.

Day 4

Morning lectures will cover tide-influenced deltas and we will then visit outcrops of the Cretaceous Sego Sandstone to look at classic outcrops that were originally interpreted as incised valley fill, now reinterpreted as deep tidal incisions.

Night will be spent in Green River, UT.

Day 5

After a lecture on incised valleys and the seismic facies of shallow marine siliciclastics we will head back to Colorado. On the way you will get to see seismic-scale outcrops of stacked coastal plain channels.

We will be spending the day at several short field-stops and go landwards to basinwards starting from the fluvial-tidal transition zone to flood tidal deltas at the mouth of a Cretaceous estuary.

We will be checking-in to a different hotel in Rangely, Colorado.

Day 6

We will meet for morning lectures on barrier islands, tidal inlets, spit systems before heading into the field.

In the field you will get to see a beautifully preserved tidal inlet which you will then compare through a series of exercises with tidal channels observed in Utah. We will also examine barrier islands, spit bars, tidal sand waves and a sequence boundary developed at the base of an incised valley.

In the afternoon we will have a workshop on participant data – we want to ensure that you can relate everything you saw in the field with your daily tasks at the office