Complex Carbonate Reservoirs: Sedimentation and Tectonic Processes - The Impact of Facies and Fractures on Reservoir Performance

INSTRUCTORS:

Raffaele Di Cuia, G.E.Plan Consulting, Ferrara, Italy; Davide Casabianca, Apache, Aberdeen, UK

INSTRUCTOR LOOKUP

DATES:

September 28 - October 4, 2013

LOCATION:

Begins in Naples and ends at Rome International Airport (Italy)

TUITION:

Member: $3,200.00

Nonmember $0.00

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Goes up to $3400 after 8/16/2013. Includes guidebooks, transportation expenses during the field seminar, all meals during the course. Does NOT include lodging.
No refunds for cancellations after 8/16/2013.

LIMIT:

15 people

CONTENT:

4.2 CEU

Who Should Attend

Petroleum geologists, reservoir engineers and geophysicists working for the exploration, appraisal and development of carbonate reservoirs. Ideally the components of a subsurface team would greatly benefit from participating together.

Objectives

The field seminar aims to demonstrate how to adequately describe facies distribution and faults and fractures characteristics, within the relevant depositional and tectonic context. Outcrop data gathering will help participants to focus on the important aspects to consider when characterizing and modelling carbonate reservoirs. Uncertainty will be a central theme and scenario modelling will be advocated as a way of managing it.

By using the outcrops of the Apulian Carbonate Platform, data from equivalent reservoirs in the subsurface of southern Italy, and from carbonate reservoirs elsewhere, participants in this field seminar will be able to:

• observe the structural organisation of the Southern Apennines geological units and infer the evolution of the thrust belt;
• recognise facies types in the Apulian Rudist Carbonate platform and in the deeper water deposits resedimented into the adjacent basin areas;
• understand the 3D organisation of sedimentary bodies from regional to reservoir scale;
• understand the hierarchy, distribution and organisation of the fault and fracture networks and their consistency with the tectonic evolution of the region;
• verify the relationships between sedimentary facies and fracture distribution;
• identify the main diagenetic processes that affected the platform and understand their impact on reservoir quality;
• identify, describe and distribute reservoir porosity and permeability ensuing from sedimentary, diagenetic and tectonic processes;
• understand the relationships between outcrop evidence (facies and structural analysis) and subsurface datasets (seismic, core, open hole logs, image logs, production logs and well tests) and discuss how to integrate both for reservoir description;
• learn and compare methods for the description of reservoir uncertainty and understand the value of additional data acquisition for reducing these uncertainties in order to inform reservoir development and management decisions.

Content

This seminar will be like following the trajectory of a well drilled through the thrust belt to target a fractured carbonate reservoir. At the beginning, we will focus on the Allochtonous thrust sheets of the fold and thrust belt, in order to understand the regional geological and structural framework. We will then reach and observe the reservoir represented by the Cretaceous Apulian Platform Carbonates, which are currently being produced in the sub-surface of Southern Italy. The main part of the field seminar will focus on the description of the fractured carbonates and the extrapolation from the outcrop observations to the subsurface for building geologically plausible reservoir models.

The main advantage of using the example of the Southern Apennines is that we can run through the drilling trajectory of the hypothetical well, not only vertically (using subsurface data) but also horizontally by moving from west coast outcrops (Naples area) to the east coast outcrops (Apulia area). The final part of the field seminar, will be spent studying an exhumed anticline (in the Abruzzi region) where there are extensive outcrops of Apulian Carbonates equivalent to some of the major oil reservoirs exploited in Italy.