Europe Blog

Meet Toyin Akinosho from Africa Oil+Gas Report who is a featured speaker at the 2015 APPEX Regional Conference in November at Nice, France. The talk will highlight the rich pickings, those who are selling and those who are buying, as well as the incentives for buying exploration, near term and producing assets.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Europe Blog

Raffaele Di Cuia from G.E.Plan Consulting s.r.l. is a featured speaker at the 2015 APPEX Regional Conference in November at Nice, France. His talk on “Central and Western Mediterranean E&P Potential Revisited and Reviewed” will review the main characteristics of the discoveries made in the past and how the lessons learned from the previous activity.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Learn! Blog

The AAPG course on “The Petroleum System: An Investigative Method to Explore for Conventional and Unconventional Hydrocarbons,” emphasizes how the petroleum system concept can be used to more systematically investigate how hydrocarbon fluid moves from the active source rock to a conventional or unconventional accumulation and thereby reduce risk. This course is part of AAPG’s upcoming Fundamentals Education Conference, taking place November 9-13, in Houston, TX.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Europe Blog

Meet Keith Myers from Richmond Energy Partners who is a featured speaker at the 2015 APPEX Regional Conference in November at Nice, France. Keith takes a keen interest in the oil sector governance and serves as a member of the Natural Resource Governance Institute and is on the guest teaching faculty of the Blavatnik School of Governance at Oxford University.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Learn! Blog

The objective of the AAPG course on “Clay Minerals (Classification, Structure, Chemistry, Properties, Diagenesis) in Reservoir Evaluation” is to instill enough fundamental and applied information about clay minerals so that a person will know what questions are relevant when formulating a work flow for a project, when evaluating real data, or when trying to figure out what might have “gone wrong” during a project. This course is part of AAPG’s upcoming Fundamentals Education Conference, taking place November 9-13, in Houston, TX.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Learn! Blog

The AAPG course on “Quick Guide to Carbonate Well Log Analysis” provides just that – a quick guide that concentrates on methods used to analyze carbonate reservoirs. It is an advanced course and assumes the course participants are already well informed about basic well logging principles. This course is part of AAPG’s upcoming Fundamentals Education Conference, taking place November 9-13, in Houston, TX.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Learn! Blog

The AAPG course on “Rock/Fluid Interactions and Natural Fracture Development and Alteration” provides a practical approach to defining reservoir fluid and pressure related natural fracture generation and fracture property alteration in conventional and unconventional reservoirs. This course is part of AAPG’s upcoming Fundamentals Education Conference, taking place November 9-13, in Houston, TX.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Learn! Blog

The AAPG course on 'RQ Toolkit – Using Rock Data for Reservoir Quality Assessment' is designed to provide a general background in optimized reservoir quality assessment using rock data (core, SWC, cuttings, outcrops). This course is part of AAPG's upcoming Fundamentals Education Conference, taking place November 9-13, in Houston, TX. 

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Learn! Blog

The AAPG course on “Practical Geomechanics” is designed for geoscientists interested in stress measurements and their application to problems arising from rock failure. This course is part of AAPG’s upcoming Fundamentals Education Conference, taking place November 9-13, in Houston.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Energy Policy Blog

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released an analysis of technologies available to cut water use in hydraulic fracturing and thermoelectric power plant cooling to identify how water-scarce areas of the country could benefit from these technologies (GAO-15-545). Perhaps of special interest to readers is the GAO analysis of waterless or low-water stimulation fluids, although GAO concludes they are either unproven or applicable to only a few geologic formations. Thermoelectric plant cooling, represents 38 percent of U.S. water withdrawals. However, natural gas produced using hydraulic fracturing and natural gas combined cycle power generation reduces water use in power generation by up to 60% relative to coal and nuclear plants.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
VG Abstract

Production from unconventional petroleum reservoirs includes petroleum from shale, coal, tight-sand and oil-sand. These reservoirs contain enormous quantities of oil and natural gas but pose a technology challenge to both geoscientists and engineers to produce economically on a commercial scale. These reservoirs store large volumes and are widely distributed at different stratigraphic levels and basin types, offering long-term potential for energy supply. Most of these reservoirs are low permeability and porosity that need enhancement with hydraulic fracture stimulation to maximize fluid drainage. Production from these reservoirs is increasing with continued advancement in geological characterization techniques and technology for well drilling, logging, and completion with drainage enhancement. Currently, Australia, Argentina, Canada, Egypt, USA, and Venezuela are producing natural gas from low permeability reservoirs: tight-sand, shale, and coal (CBM). Canada, Russia, USA, and Venezuela are producing heavy oil from oilsand. USA is leading the development of techniques for exploring, and technology for exploiting unconventional gas resources, which can help to develop potential gas-bearing shales of Thailand. The main focus is on source-reservoir-seal shale petroleum plays. In these tight rocks petroleum resides in the micro-pores as well as adsorbed on and in the organics. Shale has very low matrix permeability (nano-darcies) and has highly layered formations with differences in vertical and horizontal properties, vertically non-homogeneous and horizontally anisotropic with complicate natural fractures. Understanding the rocks is critical in selecting fluid drainage enhancement mechanisms; rock properties such as where shale is clay or silica rich, clay types and maturation , kerogen type and maturation, permeability, porosity, and saturation. Most of these plays require horizontal development with large numbers of wells that require an understanding of formation structure, setting and reservoir character and its lateral extension. The quality of shale-gas resources depend on thickness of net pay (>100 m), adequate porosity (>2%), high reservoir pressure (ideally overpressure), high thermal maturity (>1.5% Ro), high organic richness (>2% TOC), low in clay (<50%), high in brittle minerals (quartz, carbonates, feldspars), and favourable in-situ stress. During the past decade, unconventional shale and tight-sand gas plays have become an important supply of natural gas in the US, and now in shale oil as well. As a consequence, interest to assess and explore these plays is rapidly spreading worldwide. The high production potential of shale petroleum resources has contributed to a comparably favourable outlook for increased future petroleum supplies globally. Application of 2D and 3D seismic for defining reservoirs and micro seismic for monitoring fracturing, measuring rock properties downhole (borehole imaging) and in laboratory (mineralogy, porosity, permeability), horizontal drilling (downhole GPS), and hydraulic fracture stimulation (cross-linked gel, slick-water, nitrogen or nitrogen foam) is key in improving production from these huge resources with low productivity factors.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)

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