SEMINAR: MGG Student Seminar - Tues April 13

[Kelly Gibson <kgibson@rsmas.miami.edu>]

MGG Student Seminar presents:

What is it like to work as a reservoir geologist in an oil industry?

Angela Pumputis

&

Why we need more frequent InSAR acquisitions

Scott Baker

(abstracts below)

Tuesday, April 13, 12:00pm

CIMAS conference room (3rd floor)

What is it like to work as a reservoir geologists in an oil industry?

Angela Pumputis

 The main objective from this presentation is show to students the main tasks that a reservoir geologist has to complete in his/her job, and how the professionals from industries can apply university research in their work. Geologists can work in many areas in an oil company: in laboratories, in the exploration area where they try to find new fields, and in the reservoir area where they are responsible for the development of known fields. Reservoir geologists have many tasks like mapping and delimiting reservoirs, planning the development of wells to maximize production, understanding and building a 3D reservoir model, calculating reserves according official methodology, and helping to solve problems of oil/gas production and/or water injection supporting engineering. It’s important to know that all these tasks need the support from other areas like geophysics and engineering. This presentation will focus on the building of a 3D model: what is necessary to build a good one and why it’s so important.

The first step is to understand the local geology. It is necessary to analyze all available data like well data (logs, cores), seismic data, and production tests results. All these data will be used to develop a conceptual model and reservoir analogues. It is possible to use reservoir analogues to complement data that are not available in the field. To do this, it is necessary to look for the newest research in the areas of interest. The conceptual model is specific to the studied field, based on all previous data described above. All of these are fundamental to build a realistic 3D model from the field.

The 3D model is constructed using the geostatistic tool. The regular flowchart to build a 3D geological model includes: establishing the stratigraphic layering, constructing the structural framework, defining the facies model, calculating the properties model (porosity, permeability), and performing the uncertainty analysis (Deutsch, 2002). This is useful in order to estimate reservoir volumes, support well locations, combine soft data (seismic and logs) with hard data (cores, production tests), and support flow simulators and management decisions. All the 3D modeling steps include a range of uncertainty that must be minimized to avoid big mistakes at the end. The 3D modeling is essential to management of future decisions.

Why we need more frequent InSAR acquisitions

Scott Baker

The capability of interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) to measure centimeter scale displacements at the surface of the Earth provides a way to monitor volcanic activity. One issue preventing InSAR from being widely accepted as a monitoring method useful for hazard warnings is the long intervals between repeat pass acquisitions and the lack of real-time distribution of the data. A case study of Cerro Azul volcano in the Galapagos Islands shows what can be accomplished with better InSAR coverage. Cerro Azul volcano is located on the southern tip of Isabella Island off the west of coast of Ecuador and experienced two eruptions in 10 years. The eruptions started on September 15, 1998 and May 29, 2008 and lasted 51 days and 20 days respectively. ERS and Radarsat-1 data are available for the 1998 eruption with three separate satellite tracks and Envisat data is available for 2008 consisting of 8 different tracks. In both cases, the overall deformation associated with the eruptions was measured, but due to the more frequent acquisitions in 2008, the deformation during two separate eruptive phases was captured showing the progression of the eruption through time.