Course Details
This course is designed for geoscientists that work or intend to work on unconventional resource plays. The course links geomechanics and mechanical stratigraphy to sequence stratigraphy such that participants can see the value in predicting and mapping brittle facies that not only contain natural fractures but would respond to hydraulic fractures in a desired manner. Systematically the course introduces participants to the basic sedimentology of unconventional reservoirs and then covers sequence stratigraphic applications. It is assumed that participants already have a working knowledge of sequence stratigraphy and are familiar with sequence analysis on core and well-logs. We do not recommend this as a first-time introduction to sequence stratigraphy and strongly urge you to enroll in the Applied Sequence Stratigraphy course first.
Due to the homogeneous nature and limited thickness of most unconventional resource plays, seismic has very limited applicability. Therefore this is not a Seismic Stratigraphy course and the bulk of our time will be investigating these reservoirs using well logs (including borehole image logs), core and thin-sections. Each day of the course will be devoted to one play type with case-studies from popular oil and gas fields within North America.
The instructor will provide a small collection of well logs and core photos, but we strongly urge participants to bring paper copies of their own data to work on. These data will not be shared with anyone and the instructor will only review the work done by participants.
The course is divided into 4 days of lecturing and a 1-day core workshop on unconventional resource plays. We use the Bakken, Three Forks, Mowry, Mancos, Frontier and Parkman Formations to illustrate the practice of sequence analysis, if however all participants happen to work a different play type, we will be glad to arrange the last day’s workshop to better suit your learning objectives.
Who Should Attend
This is an upper level, work-intensive course that assumes participants have a background in basic sequence stratigraphic principles. The audience for the course includes geologists, geophysicists and reservoir engineers who are involved in creation of geomodels and horizontal well planning for geosteering.