Articles
Rock Physics for the “Real World”
Rosemary Knight
Geophysical methods are widely used in the earth sciences to obtain information about regions of the subsurface that we cannot directly sample. Determining the way in which the measured geophysical parameters are related to the material properties of interest (e.g. lithology, porosity, fluid content) is the objective of rock physics…
Web News
Nattalia Lea
Little did Malcolm Bertram know five years ago, that his early efforts to establish the CSEG's web presence would come of age. Back then, the New Zealand-born U of C's geophysics technician and computer systems administrator recalls, "It took awhile to get things going because in the early days, people…
Early Devonian Oil Discoveries in Western Canada
When I wrote The Richness of Discovery a history of Amoco Canada – my research helped uncover two documents that I believe are of considerable historical significance. Both were type-written, both are rare. My presentation today will deal primarily with these two documents.
... The CSEG Superfund Setting Precedent for Better Things
Nattalia Lea
Three years ago, former CSEG treasurer, Susan Eaton, debated over the future of a wad of money deposited in the CSEG bank account. "The money was in guaranteed interest certificates, earning very little interest," recalls Eaton. "It seemed to me that the money wasn't doing anything to make the organization… Seismic Reservoir Characterization (Sable Basin)
Robert Whale
The Sable Offshore Energy Project is a multi-company endeavor that formed in order to develop approximately five TCF of gas, contained in six fields in the Sable Basin of offshore eastern Canada. The reservoir sandstones in the Sable fields are late Jurassic and early Cretaceous in age and are interpreted…
Geo-Triad ‘98 Rocks, Risk, Reward
Nattalia Lea
It poured the night before. Oil prices plunged to anorexic levels on the previous Friday. And conference organizers, were neophytes, when it came to masterminding and executing the largest convention of its kind in Calgary for the last century. Never before had a joint convention been held , culminating the…
Avoiding pitfalls in geostatistical reservoir characterization: A survival guide
K. Hirsche, S. Boerner and C. Kalkomey, C. Castaldi
Geostatistics provide a powerful framework for combining sparsely sampled but accurate well information with the densely sampled but less precise 3D seismic information. When used correctly it can provide accurate estimates of reservoir properties and an assessment of the uncertainty and risks associated with our reservoir models. However, geostatistical tools…
Simultaneous Estimation of Statics and Velocity
Timo Tjan and Ken Lamer
Where subsurface is complex, reflection data from land seismic surveys often suffer triply – from statics variations, the presence of various types of noise, and imperfect moveout correction due to crossing events and non-hyperbolic movement that varies rapidly with midpoint. For such data, velocity analysis, already difficult due to the…
Geophysical Consortia in Universities – A Vehicle for Research and Education
Larry Lines
As we approach the twenty-first century, the discovery of petroleum and minerals continue to have a major impact on the Canadian economy. Oil exploration and production efforts are active on the Atlantic Coast, the Rocky Mountain foothills, and the Western Canadian basin. With this activity comes an increased demand for…
CGG Newsnotes
Four special CGC Committees (PUBLIC AWARENESS; COOPERATION; ECONOMIC GROWTH; EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE) have been set up to implement a series of specific projects to enhance the Geosciences in Canada over the next several years. Reviews of these plans were undertaken at the last two CGC meetings and initial committee activities…
International Exploration and Expatriate Recruitment and Effectiveness: The Overseas Assignment
David Mitrovica
A dominant theme of the 1990's has been and continues to be the issue of globalization. Globalization encapsulates a description of a rapid and pervasive diffusion around the world of production, consumption, investment and trade flows in goods, services, capital and technology. Globalization has yielded such crucial worldwide trends as…
The Other Side of Fold
J. Bouska
Traditional notions of stack fold can lead us astray in 3-D seismic design. The consequence of fold variation appears to be more complicated than a simple relationship for signal to noise based solely on the square root of the number of traces in a common midpoint gather. This is particularly…
International Exploration and Expatriate Recruitment and Effectiveness: The Overseas Assignment
Gary F. Margrave, Robert J. Ferguson, and Alana R. Schoepp
A nonstationary generalization of the convolution integral is presented. Called nonstationary convolution, it forms the scaled superposition of impulse responses, whose form can vary arbitrarily with time or position, 'and has stationary convolution as a limiting form. An alternate formulation is also given, which has the same limiting form but…
Reservoir Quality Mapping with Geostatistical and Neural Network Techniques
Rainer Tonn and Jonathan Downton
This case study shows techniques to map quantitatively a Triassic Halfway reservoir in NE British Columbia, Canada. The sand is at a depth of roughly 1000 meters and has a reservoir thickness that is within the seismic tuning thickness. It demonstrates how significant seismic attributes can be extracted from 20…
Regional interpretation of steep faults in the Alberta Basin from public-domain gravity and magnetic data: an update
Darran J. Edwards, Henry V. Lyatsky and R. James Broten
The capability of providing regional information cheaply on the structure of sedimentary basins makes gravity and magnetic maps, in conjunction with seismic and geological information, potentially powerful tools in hydrocarbon exploration. In the Phanerozoic rocks of the Alberta Basin, significant magnetization is rare, and most magnetic anomalies are sourced in…
History Revisited – Atlantic No.3, 1948
Aubrey Kerr
The tumultuous chain of events on this freehold quarter, just one mile east of Imperial Leduc's 1947 discovery, commenced in the summer of 1947 with Frank McMahon breaking Imperial Oil's lease (signed in September 1946; bonus: 5 cents/acre). With the help of "Bus" Lacey, he top-leased, paying the Rebus family…
Seismic Anisotropy: From Constipation to Exploration Effectiveness
Dr. Leon Thomsen
Conventional isotropic seismology has been the most spectacularly successful technology in the history of oil exploration. In recent years, its extension to 3D application, recognizing the inherent 3D nature of our world, has significantly enhanced our exploration. In recent years, its extension to 3D application, recognizing the inherent 3D nature…
Integrated Technology Streamlines Amoco Exploitation Project
Darcy B. Cuthill, William P. Beaudoin, Werner Froehlich
A multidisciplinary asset team 1 with Amoco Canada's Oil Business Unit recently improved the quality of an exploitation program in a small oil field in Western Saskatchewan. The two month study utilized an integrated suite of Landmark applications for geology, geophysics, petrophysics, and reservoir engineering in a common work environment…
The Significance of the West Stoddart Doig Oil Discovery, Northeastern British Columbia
Doug Pruden and Peter Guyan
The newly discovered West Stoddart Field represents one of the largest Doig oil reservoirs in all of northeastern British Columbia, comprising at least four pools containing 50 million bbls of oil (7.95e6m3) and 8 Bd of gas (0.23e9m3). From the time that Remington Energy rig released the 16-32-87-21W6 discovery well…
Optimizing the Value of Your Seismic Program
Patrick Walsh
Oil & Gas firms face the constant challenge of improving their success rate while lowering the cost and time required to achieve those successes. A significant influence on a firm's ability to achieve competitive advantage and success is the use of digital data within their processes.
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