Laying it all out at the Core Conference

Bobbing in the wake of the talks, the Core Conference turned out to be more exemplary of this year's theme, Integration. Best of all were SAGD case studies, where multi-disciplinary experiments are the only way to make sense of the sticky stuff.

Coring through steam

Travis Shackleton from Cenovus did a wonderful presentation showing the impact of bioturbation, facies boundaries, and sedimentary structures on steam chamber evolution in the McMurray Formation at the FCCL project. And because I had the chance to work on this project with ConocoPhillips a few years ago, but didn't, this work induced both jealousy and awe. Their experiment design is best framed as a series of questions:

• What if we drilled, logged, and instrumented two wells only 10 m apart? (Awesome.)
• What if we collected core in both of them? (Double awesome.)
• What if the wells were in the middle of a mature steam chamber? (Triple awesome.)
• What if we collected 3D seismic after injecting all this steam and compare with with a 3D from before? (Quadruple awesome.)

It is the first public display of SAGD-depleted oil sand, made available by an innovation of high-temperature core recovery. Travis pointed to a portion of core that had been rinsed by more than 5 years of steam circulating through it. It had a pale brown color and a residual oil saturation S_O of 15% (bottom sample in the figure). Then he pointed to a segment of core above the top of the steam chamber. It too was depleted, by essentially the same amount. You'd never know just by looking. It was sticky and black and largely unscathed. My eyes were fooled, direct observation deceived.

A bitumen core full of fractures

Jen-Russel-Houston held up a half-tube of core of high-density fractures riddled throughout bitumen saturated rock. The behemoth oil sands that require thermal recovery assistance have an equally promising but lesser known carbonate cousin, still in its infancy. It is the bitumen saturated Grosmont Formation, located to the west of the more mature in-situ projects in sand. The reservoir is entirely dolomite, hosting its own unique structures affecting the spreading of steam and the reduction of bitumen's viscosity to a flowable level.

Jen and her team at OSUM hope their pilot will demonstrate that these fractures serve as transport channels for the steam, allowing it to creep around tight spots in the reservoir, which would otherwise be block the steam in its tracks. These are not the same troubling baffles and barriers caused by mud plugs or IHS, but permeability heterogeneities caused by the dolomitization process. A big question is the effective permeability at the length scales of production, which is phenomenologically different to measurements made from cut core. I overheard a spectator suggest to Jen that she try to freeze a sleeve of core, soak it with acid then rinse the dolomite out the bottom. After which only a frozen sculpture of the bitumen would remain. Crazy? Maybe. Intriguing? Indeed. 

Let's do more science with rocks!

Two impressive experiments, unabashedly and literally laid out for all to see, equipped with clever geologists, and enriched by supplementary technology. Both are thoughtful initiatives—real scientific experiments—that not only make the operating companies more profitable, but also profoundly improve our understanding of a precious resource for society. Two role models for how comprehensive experiments can serve more than just those who conduct them. Integration at its very best, centered on core.

What are the best examples of integrated geoscience that you've seen?

A really good conversation

Today was Day 2 of the Canada GeoConvention. But... all we had the energy for was the famous Unsolved Problems Unsession. So no real highlights today, just a report from the floor of Room 101.

Today was the day. We slept about as well as two 8-year-olds on Christmas Eve, having been up half the night obsessively micro-hacking our meeting design (right). The nervous anticipation was richly rewarded. About 50 of the most creative, inquisitive, daring geoscientists at the GeoConvention came to the Unsession — mostly on purpose. Together, the group surfaced over 100 pressing questions facing the upstream industry, then filtered this list to 4 wide-reaching problems of integration:

• making the industry more open
• coping with error and uncertainty
• improving seismic resolution
• improving the way our industry is perceived

We owe a massive debt of thanks to our heroic hosts: Greg Bennett, Tannis McCartney, Chris Chalcraft, Adrian Smith, Charlene Radons, Cale White, Jenson Tan, and Tooney Fink. Every one of them far exceeded their brief and brought 100× more clarity and continuity to the conversations than we could have had without them. Seriously awesome people.  

This process of waking our industry up to new ways of collaborating is just beginning. We will, you can be certain, write more about the unsession after we've had a little time to parse and digest what happened.

If you're at the conference, tell us what we missed today!

Here comes GeoConvention 2013

Next week Matt and I are heading to the petroleum capital of Canada for the 2013 GeoConvention. There will be 308 talks, 125 posters, over 4000 attendees, 100 exhibiting companies, and at least 2 guys blogging their highlights off.

My picks for Monday

Studying the technical abstracts ahead of time is the only way to make the most of your schedule. There are 9 sessions going on at any given time, a deep sense of FOMO has already set in. These are the talks I have decided on for Monday: 

Seismics for unconventionals

I watched Carl Reine from Nexen give a talk two years ago where he deduced a power-law relationship characterizing natural fracture networks in the Horn River shale. He will show how integrating such fracture intensity patterns with inversion models yields a powerful predictor of frackability, and uses microseismic to confirm it.

On a related note, and also from the Horn River Basin, Andreas Wuestefeld will show how microseismic can be used to identify fluid drainage patterns from microseismic data. Production simulation from an actual microseismic experiment. Numerical modeling, and physical experiment inextricably linked. I already love it.

Forward models and experimental tests

One is a design case study for optimizing interpolation, the other is a 3D seismic geometry experiment, the third is a benchtop physical fracture model made out of Plexiglass and resin.

Broadband seismic

Gets to the point of what hinders seismic resolution, and it does something about it through thoughtful design. This is just really nice looking data, two talks, same author: a step change, and impact of broadband. 

Best title award 

Goes to Forensic chemostratigraphy. Gimmicky name or revolutionary concept? You can't always judge a talk by the title, or the quality of the abstract. But it's hard not to. What talks are on your must-see list this year?

A really good conversation

Matt and I are hosting an unsession on the morning of Tuesday 7 May. It will be structured, interactive, and personal. The result: a ranked list of the most pressing problems facing the upstream geoscientists, especially in those hard to reach places between the disciplines. This is not a session where you sit and listen. Everyone will participate. We will explore questions that matter, connect diverse perspectives, and, above all, capture our collective knowledge. It might be scary, it might be uncomfortable, it might not be for you. But if you think it is, bring your experience and individuality, and we will do that thing called integration. We can only host 60 people, so if you don't want to be turned away, arrive early to claim a spot. We start at 8 a.m. in Telus 101/102 on the main floor of the north building.

An invitation to a brainstorm

Who of us would not be glad to lift the veil behind which the future lies hidden; to cast a glance at the next advances of our science and at the secrets of its development during future centuries? What particular goals will there be toward which the leading [geoscientific] spirits of coming generations will strive? What new methods and new facts in the wide and rich field of [geoscientific] thought will the new centuries disclose?

— Adapted from David Hilbert (1902). Mathematical Problems, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 8 (10), p 437–479. Originally appeared in in Göttinger Nachrichten, 1900, pp. 253–297.

Back at the end of October, just before the SEG Annual Meeting, I did some whining about conferences: so many amazing, creative, energetic geoscientists, doing too much listening and not enough doing. The next day, I proposed some ways to make conferences for productive — for us as scientists, and for our science itself. 

Evan and I are chairing a new kind of session at the Calgary GeoConvention this year. What does ‘new kind of session’ mean? Here’s the lowdown:

The Unsolved Problems Unsession at the 2013 GeoConvention will transform conference attendees, normally little more than spectators, into active participants and collaborators. We are gathering 60 of the brightest, sparkiest minds in exploration geoscience to debate the open questions in our field, and create new approaches to solving them. The nearly 4-hour session will look, feel, and function unlike any other session at the conference. The outcome will be a list of real problems that affect our daily work as subsurface professionals — especially those in the hard-to-reach spots between our disciplines. Come and help shed some light, room 101, Tuesday 7 May, 8:00 till 11:45.

What you can do

• Where does your workflow stumble? Think up the most pressing unsolved problems in your workflows — especially ones that slow down collaboration between the disciplines. They might be organizational, they might be technological, they might be scientific.
• Put 7 May in your calendar and come to our session! Better yet, bring a friend. We can accommodate about 60 people. Be one of the first to experience a new kind of session!
• If you would like to help host the event, we're looking for 5 enthusiastic volunteers to play a slightly enlarged role, helping guide the brainstorming and capture the goodness. You know who you are. Email hello@agilegeoscience.com. 

The calculus of geology

Calculus is the tool for studying things that change. Even so, in the midst of the dynamic and heterogeneous earth, calculus is an under-practised and, around the water-cooler at least, under-celebrated workhorse. Maybe that's because people don't realize it's all around us. Let's change that. 

Derivatives of duration

We can plot the time f(x) that passes as a seismic wave travels though space x. This function is known to many geophysicists as the time-to-depth function. It is key for converting borehole measurements, effectively recorded using a measuring tape, to seismic measurements, recorded using a stop watch.

Now let's take the derivative of f(x) with repsect to x. The result is the slowness function (the reciprocal of interval velocity):

The time duration that a seismic wave travels over a small interval (one metre). This function is an actual sonic well log. Differentiating once again yields this curious spiky function:

Geophysicists will spot that this resembles a reflection coefficient series, which governs seismic amplitudes. This is actually a transmission coefficient function, but that small detail is beside the point. In this example, the creating a synthetic seismogram mimics the calculus of geology. 

If you are familiar with the integrated trace attribute, you will recognize that it is an attempt to compute geology by integrating reflectivity spikes. The only issue in this case, and it is a major issue, is that the seismic trace is bandlimited. It does not contain all the information about the earth's slowness. So the earth's geology remains elusive and blurry.

The derivative of slowness yields the reflection boundaries, the integral of slowness yields their position. So in geophysics speak, I wonder, is forward modeling akin to differentiation, and inverse modeling akin to integration? I find it fascinating that these three functions have essentially the same density of information, yet they look increasingly complicated when we take derivatives. 

What other functions do you come across that might benefit from the calculus treatment?

The sonic log used in this example is from the O-32-B/11-E-64 well onshore Nova Scotia, which is publically available but not easily accessible online.