Session 1: Existing Best Practices of Exploration

Best practices of exploration in the oil and gas industry are continually being advanced and developed in many ways in accordance with technical innovations and the industry's needs.  Advancement and development across the industry have significantly increased over the last few years. However, unresolved challenges in exploration remain,  particularly for unconventional resources, and therefore, this session is designed to bring together geoscientists, petroleum engineers,  leaders, and decision-makers to share the advancement and development of best practices in exploration with examples of how best practices that are being developed recently and over time as well as unresolved challenges in reservoir characterization for both conventional and unconventional resources.

This session aims to cover a large spectrum of topics pertinent to current issues related to exploration: examples of applied research conducted by the industry, academia, and consulting firms, topics include but are not limited to current exploration challenges and solutions, subsurface imaging, and advances in reservoir characterization, identifying new resources, investigating geological systems, integrated geological, geophysical field, and subsurface studies, source rock and traps characterization and modeling, highlighting new and proven approaches, evaluation, characterization, and sweet-spot prediction of unconventional resources,  new advances in reservoir geology, geophysics, geochemistry, characterization of natural fractures and application of new technologies and innovative solutions to improve environmental footprint.

We hope that this session fulfills the objective of the workshop in providing a technical discussion to cover recent advancements and developments in exploration along with a future outlook on exploration innovations in solving currently unresolved challenges.

Session 2: Under-Explored and Emerging Exploration Concepts

Exploration efforts have long focused, primarily on the abundance of four way dip closure traps. However, since most of these relatively easy to find structures have been already drilled, current and future exploration efforts will need to focus on subtle and complex trap setups (i.e. Stratigraphic, combination traps, hydrodynamic, ..etc.). These are often difficult to recognize, and will require the integration of a wide range of data types along with the ingenuity of geoscientists to provide the technical context needed to mature such concepts. Furthermore, tapping into the recent digital revolution and advancements in machine learning will enable geoscientists to tackle complex challenges and provide them with more accurate prediction of the subsurface, leading the way to mature and target new exploration concepts.

Session 3:  The Role of Integrated Modeling in Maturing New Exploration Concepts

Due to the increasing complexity of exploration targets, modeling became an integral part of the workflow to identify and mature new exploration concepts. Building a robust geological model is considered to be key to understand complex geological processes. Furthermore, with increasing need for more sophisticated models to understand such complex processes, there is an exponential increase in the computational power of workstations and the development AI algorithms that enable the generation of such advanced models. However, the main challenge for modelers remains to be how to integrate different types of data including (seismic data, well data, cores, analogs, and dynamic…etc) while ensuring consistency in interpretation across a wide range of disciplines and at different scale levels, from basin to prospect scale. In addition to the challenge of properly addressing the risks and uncertainties associated with any generated model, in order to best guide future exploration drilling decisions and strategies.

Session 4: Innovative Geophysical Techniques for Generating Exploration Prospects

Innovative Geophysical methods including seismic, non-seismic and borehole geophysical measurements provide an integrated approach for Oil and Gas exploration encompassing data acquisition, processing, interpretation, and inversion.

As the demand for oil and gas continues to grow globally, research efforts should prioritize sustainable geophysical methods for exploration to improve reserves ratio recovery. Conventional technologies are being replaced speedily and exploration work has become fast, focused, and readily reproducible keeping in pace with the changing global scenarios. Innovative Geophysical technologies gives insight to modern concepts of hydrocarbon exploration for those working in the various fields of conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon reservoirs and geothermal exploration.

The theme of  the innovative geophysical techniques for generating exploration prospects is divided into sections which include case studies focusing on modern acquisition technologies, innovation seismic processing and imaging workflows and algorithms, Key technologies in seismic inversion, rock physicist and reservoir characterization as well as ML/AL aiding in geophysical data processing and interpretation.

Geophysical methods allow to study the physical properties of the subsurface rocks and they can be used in different phases of the exploration to collect different types of information. Geophysical methods such as seismic and non-seismic (gravimetric, magnetic, magnetotelluric,…) are often combined to obtain more accurate and reliable results which help in identifying new prospects and in its value estimation, also in risk assessment.

Session 5: Multi-Disciplinary Case Studies: Geology, Geophysics, Petrophysics

The fast changing energy landscape coupled with the exploration challenges faced by the hydrocarbon industry require sophisticated and diverse technologies to ensure a safe and reliable energy future for the future generations. The ever-rising global energy demand, highly volatile price for hydrocarbon resources, and increasingly stringent environmental regulations have led to the need for optimized exploration strategies. Navigating these economic and technological challenges effectively require multi-disciplinary workflows that are able to extract maximum value from the available data. This session welcomes case studies that underscore the complimentary nature of geological, geophysical, and petrophysical techniques. We are interested in learning what new insights can be obtained through such a multi-disciplinary approach, and how such multi-disciplinary workflows can be optimized to unlock the remaining hydrocarbon potential of the subsurface and keep pace with the exploration targets in a challenging business environment.

Session 6: Advancement in Unconventional Resources Exploration and Characterization

Exploration of Unconventional resources have proven to be very complex and categorized as a high-risk investment however with high rewards. Unconventional plays are highly heterogeneous with complex rock and fluid properties, distributions at multiple scales. Capturing the variability at the earliest is the critical aspect for evaluating recoverable resources and further optimum development of the field.  To address the challenges, integration of geoscience and engineering is one of the key aspect for defining the controls that influence the productivity and make Unconventional Resource profitable / viable.

Unconventional resources Exploration and Development in Middle East is considered to have significantly huge potential. The session ‘Advancement in Unconventional Resources Exploration and Characterization’ intends to deliberate the geoscience perspective of the recent developments in unconventional resource exploration and characterization with emphasis to Middle East. Advancement in the unconventional resources exploration include but not limited to the latest technological advances in seismic interpretation techniques, assessment of key reservoir properties, such as TOC content and the elastic moduli, that help to guide to map the sweet spots in the reservoir with favorable characteristics for production.

The Advancement in Unconventional Resources Exploration and Characterization session aims to cover a wide range of geoscience approaches, seismic interpretation, rock mechanical properties and deformation processes, petrophysical properties, geochemical properties and advanced core analysis.