Presidential Column

…Welcome back. I hope your summer was eventful and full of good times with your family and friends. Things have been busy amongst the various CSEG committees I’m involved with. So many things have been going on that I’m going to use subtitles to highlight them. ELECTION 2010: Calling for…

Executive Message

…“The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards”. – Anatole France First, a special “Thank you” to Jennifer Leslie-Panek, my predecessor, for her mentoring, which enabled me to better prepare myself for a very…

CAGC Column

…Quiet – it has remained a quiet summer. Crew counts bottomed out in June but more showed on the books into July – very similar to happenings in 2009. The next month or two should begin to show what the winter will look like as Oil Companies move into budget…

Tracing the Industry

…The summer that never was… That is how a newscaster referred to this summer. While the weather wasn’t great, there was a lot of activity in the seismic world. At least judging by the number of announcements I received for this issue. I haven’t had this many announcements in over…

Grapevine

…Welcome back to work… for all of you who took summer holidays! Judging by how light traffic is heading into downtown Calgary in the morning, I think most people took advantage, and got out of rainy Calgary to sunnier climes. One such group was Paige Snelling and her crew who…

Nanna Eliuk

An Interview with Nanna Eliuk

…Nanna, tell us about your early education and your work experience? I grew up in Denmark and completed my B.Sc in geology and geophysics at Aarhus University before I came to Canada in the summer of 1995. I was initially supposed to stay for 6 months as a foreign student…

Carbon capture and storage: opportunities and challenges for geophysics

Don Lawton

…Introduction Carbon capture and storage (CCS) involves capturing CO2 from point-source surface facilities and injecting it into subsurface geological formations, particularly depleted oil and gas reservoirs, unmineable coal seams or deep saline aquifers. In 2008 the government of Alberta committed CDN$2B to accelerate CCS in the province, with the goal…

Shear-wave sourced 3-D VSP Image Interpretation of Tight Gas Sandstones in Rulison Field, Colorado

Prajnajyoti Mazumdar and Thomas L. Davis

…Introduction Exploration and development of tight-gas sandstone reservoirs relies heavily on understanding the distribution of sandstone bodies in the subsurface. Shear-wave sourced 3-D vertical seismic profiling (VSP) data are used for sandstone detection and fractured interval delineation. We apply anisotropic Kirchhoff 3-D prestack depth migration to the shear wave VSP…

Isostasy and Gravity Modelling: Integrating Potential Field Data in Interpretation Workflows

David Close

…1. Introduction Potential field data, namely gravity and magnetic data, provide a relatively low cost means of mapping regional geological trends and structures. Magnetic data are typically of most value in regions where igneous and metamorphic rocks are common and they have proved particularly vital for understanding the structure and…

Presidential Column

…In 2008 the CSEG and the CSPG formed a near permanent business partnership which we call the Joint Annual Convention, or JAC. The JAC agreement specified that we would hold joint annual conventions which would be run by a pseudo independent committee called the Joint Annual Convention Committee, or JACC.…

Letter to the Editor

…Dear Editor: I read with great interest the excellent interview with John Boyd, published in the May 2010 issue of the RECORDER. I humbly judge it to be one of the best interviews so far published. I congratulate the interviewers and the interviewed full heartedly for a splendid job they…

CAGC Column

…The Oil spill in the Gulf does not help public perception issues our Industry has here in Canada and the world. On the other hand it has taken some global heat off the OilSands for the time being. They look relatively benign as a land based operation as compared to…

Science Break: Solar Cells

…In writing these articles, I have moved from topics that I am very familiar with, to topics that I know very little about. In other words I am now using the process of writing the articles as a way of learning more about things that I am interested in and…

Tracing the Industry

…I want to extend my apologies to the folks at Absolute Imaging. Their announcement below about Brendan Smith joining the company should have been in the May RECORDER. With all the spam these days, the announcement did not get to me. Thank you very much for your patience Elvis and…

Grapevine

…June 2010 – After a crazy May, which started out with a couple snowstorms, had the GeoCanada2010 Convention in the middle and is rounded up nicely into the summer months… I am ready for golf season! Haha… No, really… I’ve been practicing! I will SO be ready for the T-Wave…

John Pendrel

An Interview with John Pendrel

…John, let us begin by asking you about your educational qualifications and your work experience. You are starting with the hard questions first. Actually I don’t have any Geophysics or Geology classes to speak of. I sort of fell into that – I did a Bachelor of Science degree at…

Shear-wave sourced 3-D VSP Depth Imaging of Tight Gas Sandstones in Rulison Field, Colorado

Prajnajyoti Mazumdar and Thomas L. Davis

…Introduction Rulison Field, Piceance Basin, Colorado was approved for development drilling to 10-acre spacing in 2003. The down spacing and hydraulic fracturing within this unconventional reservoir has increased its production five fold in less than a decade. A significant portion of the gas production is from low permeability fluvial discontinuous…

Tight Gas Geophysics: AVO Inversion for Reservoir Characterization

David Close, Simon Stirling, David Cho, and Frederik Horn

…Summary A general discussion of some of the critical steps in AVO inversion workflows is included with a Western Canadian case study in this paper. We use the case study to illustrate that the ratio of the compressional and shear wave velocities (Vp/Vs) is a useful indicator of quartz-clay ratios…

Presidential Column

…My first month as CSEG President has been interesting and a little busier than expected. Outside of the monthly meeting I’ve attended a CSEG Website committee meeting, a CSEG Foundation Meeting, and have had discussions with Jon Downton, Larry Herd and Laurie Ross. We are talking about our partnership with…

Executive Message

…Happy May 2010! The theme of this executive message is community... just thought I would just spell it out for you all. It was after Peter Duncan’s address at the March CSEG AGM where he won the 2009 Honorary Membership Award, and spoke about (and I will paraphrase a little)…