Course Details
Wyoming’s Powder River Basin (PRB) is world-renowned for its prolific energy resources (coal, gas, and oil) and incredible diversity of reservoirs and traps. Conventional, hybrid, halo, and shale plays are all important economic drivers and serve as models for similar depositional systems around the world. They also highlight the critical role of structural elements in deposition, hydrocarbon migration, and trap configuration.
The outstanding outcrops of the PRB are supplemented by abundant, publicly available core, well log, and seismic data, making them among the best documented analogs in the world. Participants will have the opportunity to examine:
- Wave-dominated shoreface deposits
- Incised fluvial deposits
- River and tide-influenced regressive and transgressive deltaic deposits
- Offshore, shelf sandstone bodies
- Coal-bearing coastal plain and back-barrier deposits
- Source rocks
Many of these deposits and locations have been the subject of decades-long debates, discussions, and disagreements because they do not fit neatly into generalized depositional models. Participants will learn how to use firsthand observations of sedimentary structures, ichnofossils, stratal surfaces, and depositional architecture to predict reservoir scale, architecture, and relationship to source rocks and seals. A variety of well log and core images will be used to connect the outcrop examples to their interpreted modern depositional equivalents.
By the end of the trip, you will be able to:
- Identify fluvial, deltaic, shoreface, and transgressive shelf sand deposits based on grain size profile, sedimentary structures, and ichnofossils.
- Predict reservoir properties of a variety of shallow marine geobodies away from well bore using appropriate analogs and primary observations.
- Predict locations of highest quality source rock based on location of fluvial point sources and location within the sedimentary basin.
- Construct depositional environment maps calibrated by appropriate modern and ancient analogs and incorporating structural elements.
- Recognize that multiple depositional scenarios can be used to construct end member models of reservoir bodies and calibrate local and regional correlations.
Who Should Attend
- Geologists
- Geophysicists
- Petrophysicists
- Engineers
- Geomodelers
- Drillers
This course is designed for geoscientists and reservoir engineers who are focused on subsurface characterization of the Frontier, Turner, Parkman, Shannon, Sussex and Teapot Tight Oil Sandstones.