Introduction To March Focus: GeoConvention Preview

The late, great Tom Podivinsky said "for generating prospects, fundamentally we look at whatever everyone else is doing and then copy them" in his RECORDER interview (January, 2014). Let us also not forget that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I always look forward to attending the GeoConvention. It may just be a couple of words here, an image there, and boom, there goes my current problem – solved.

This month's technical section features five excellent papers submitted at the behest of the RECORDER's Chief Editor, Penny Colton. Four of the papers will be presented at this year's GeoConvention.

The first paper from Ian Cockerill and Aaron Hughes (GeoConvention oral presentation, Tuesday March 8, 3:50 - 4:15 pm, Telus 104 - 106) nicely illustrates how the Common Risk Segment mapping approach is used for regional scale studies. This technique stacks critical play elements within the hydrocarbon system to identify potential sweetspots. They adapted this workflow, substituting "Recovery" for "Risk". Their Common Recovery Segment maps were calibrated to existing production, and maps of Estimated Ultimate Recovery and Recovery Factor were generated for use in the search for new liquid-rich Montney sweetspots.

In the second paper, Drew Chorney et al. (GeoConvention oral presentation, Monday March 7, 1:50 – 2:15 pm, Glen 208 – 209) demonstrate value from microseismic data recorded in the Montney formation. They calibrated their reservoir geomechanical model to their recorded microseismicity, and use the updated model to test different fracture and completion designs.

Satinder Chopra and Kurt Marfurt describe in the third paper how the increased speed and capacity of modern supercomputers helps us to: (1) compute more accurate solutions that were previously available; (2) compute state-of-the-art solutions in near real-time, impacting business decisions while a well is being drilled; and (3) compute state-of-the art solutions of multiple reservoir scenarios for risk analysis.

The fourth paper, by Ritesh Sharma et al. (GeoConvention oral presentation, Tuesday March 8, 8:15 – 8:40 am, Glen 201 - 202), describes how we can reduce uncertainty when characterizing the Vaca Muerta shale using P-Impedance from post-stack seismic inversion. They show a negative correlation between P-Impedance and TOC. Facies were predicted using the Bayesian classification approach. Curvature attributes were used to identify faults and lineaments.

In the final paper, Satinder Chopra and Ritesh Sharma (GeoConvention oral presentation, Tuesday March 8, 1:50 – 2:15 pm, Glen 203 - 204) describe how they pre-condition their seismic data for impedance inversion, using thin-bed reflectivity inversion to increase the vertical resolution of the data. They observed a better match between the inverted P-Impedance and the P-Impedance calculated from well logs after pre-conditioning with the thin-bed reflectivity inversion process, and expect that this improves interpretations.