April 2007 Newsletter
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We had three events in March which successfully promoted the LPS:
- A very successful seminar on the Petrophysical Inputs to Reservoir Modelling which attracted more than 80 attendees (definitely a record for the last 5 years). All credits to Jonathan Lean, Robert Webber and specially Steve Cannon for a very well appreciated venue. Obviously, we do not forget all the LPS members that contributed to the venue success by flocking in.
- Dr. David Potter gave a technical and interesting talk explaining the advances in magnetic susceptibility measurements on core at our monthly evening meeting.
- Finally the long awaited new LPS Web site (the URL www.lps.org.uk has not changed).
The LPS membership stands at 94+ thanks to the continuous effort of Assia.
Coming up:
On the 19th of April Christian Bucker of RWE-DEA will reveal some hot topics on
Geothermal Petrophysics (Feasibility of Geothermal Power Generation in the German
Upper Rhine Graben. An Analysis of the Geological and Petrophysical Conditions)
We are still struggling for an evening talk to be presented on the 21st May but we hope to
announce the topic shortly. Obviously if anyone has anything they would be willing to
share please let any commitee member know.
We are also in the early stages of planning another seminar on Immersive Visualization for
the summer. Many of you will remember the very successful seminar that we held at BP
Sunbury a few years ago. This is planned as a follow up to that event. Again we plan to
hold this seminar at Sunbury, thanks to the generosity of BP. A number of potential
presenters have been contacted but if you or others in your organisations have any thing
that shows how technical challenges are being addressed by 2D or 3D visualisation then we
would like to hear from you. This could be pore scale modelling, reservoir modelling, well
planning or anything else that requires a visualisation to aid in a better understanding and
interpretation.
Regards
Patrick Crossouard LPS President
Abstract of talk for the London Petrophysical Society (LPS) Evening meeting, 19th April 2007, 6pm at Burlington House, Piccadilly.
Feasibility of Geothermal Power Generation in the German Upper Rhine Graben. An Analysis of the Geological and Petrophysical Conditions
C. Bücker, W. Apel, J. Strobel and the Geo_T Team at RWE Dea Hamburg
Geothermal power production in Germany is supported through the Renewable Electricity
act (feed in law EEG), which initiated several geothermal projects in Southern Germany.
A consortium of EnBW, RWE Power and RWE Dea has carried out a feasibility study to
evaluate the utilisation of geothermal heat for power generation in the Upper Rhine Graben
in Southern Germany. As one result the study indicates clear preferential areas for possible
geothermal projects in this region. However, the main factors for geothermal power plants
are given by the geological conditions. The temperatures in the geological horizons of
interest Buntsandstein and Muschelkalk are with up to 160°C outstanding. But hot water
production of 360 m!/h, as would be desired for profitable projects cannot be expected
based on the determined reservoir characteristics. The study highlights the petrophysical
conditions in geological horizons of interest and the consequences for geothermal power
generation.
From VP External Relations: Report on the London Petrophysical Society Open Day 24th January 2007 at Royal Holloway (Windsor Building)
The LPS held the 2007 University Open Day at Royal Holloway University on the 24th
January. Despite the snowy conditions around 200 university students and staff were in
attendance from the following universities:
1. Imperial College London
2. Leeds University
3. Leicester University
4. Manchester University
5. Royal Holloway College
6. University College London
We had a great selection of talks that included introducing petrophysics, topics presented
by young petrophysicists and a perspective of geoscience careers.
1. Basic Concepts of Petrophysics (Leeds University: Mike Lovell)
2. Field life of a Petrophysicist (BG: Matthew Waugh)
3. Petrophysics as Value (Shell: Josie Bisett)
4. Petrophysics from LWD (Baker: Adrian Adeniran)
5. Geoscience Careers: (Royal Holloway: Chris Elders)
The events success was very dependent on the generous support of several operators and
service companies.
1. BG Group
2. Shell
3. ExxonMobil
4. Schlumberger
5. Baker Hughes and Inteq
6. Weatherford
7. Perenco
8. ConocoPhillips
9. Hess
Participating sponsors were extremely pleased with the enthusiasm of the students.
Obviously the current buoyancy of the oil industry has fuelled the need for graduates of a
variety of disciplines. Several sponsors remarked that they would be requesting follow-up
interviews with students. This in itself speaks a great deal for the success of the event.
For many of the students the journey to Royal Holloway was long and necessitated a predawn
start. Such enthusiasm we hope was rewarded by an informative session. The LPS
would like to extend particular thanks to the Royal Holloway University staff and students
led by Dr Chris Elder, who provided a great venue for the event and coordinated the various
hosting activities. The new Windsor Building and its lecture theatre proved to be a great
venue with ample seating and display area on the mezzanine. Our current plans are to hold
the 2008 event in Durham.
From VP Seminar: Report on LPS Reservoir Modelling Seminar, 8th March at Burlington House
The scope of this seminar revolved around the petrophysical inputs to 3D Geocellular reservoir modelling, i.e. the determination, upscaling and distribution away from the wellbore of facies, porosity, saturation, permeability and the use of core and seismic data in conditioning these models. Inspiration for the seminar stemmed from observations from a number of attendees at a 2006 presentation given by Steve Cannon of Roxar that ownership of petrophysical data is often a cloudy issue in the multi-disciplinary environment that 3-D reservoir modelling engenders, and it is often a concern that there are many opportunities change the distribution of reservoir properties between the step up from wellbore to reservoir scale if one does not understand the mathematics of the (many) geo-statistical approaches available to the reservoir modeller.
Steve kindly agreed to champion a fuller seminar and managed to attract a diverse range of talks from the oil company, contractor and software vendor community. This in turn attracted an attendance of 80+, not only petrophysicists but also geoscientists and engineers. Ashley Francis of Earthworks, an SPE Distinguished Lecturer, set the scene with a keynote speech on managing uncertainty in the reservoir model. He showed how different geostatistical approaches in upscaling and distribution can effect the resultant model, in some cases detrimentally by over smoothing results or narrowing the range of possible outcomes. The next talk by Steve Cannon of Roxar cautioned the modeller that whatever the modelling or geostatistical approaches selected, there still had to be an appreciation of the input data and that geology and physics had to be respected with the ultimate test being the question: Does it Look Right!?
Colin Daly of Schlumberger continued the seminar with a summary of various geostatistical techniques, from the historically available methods such as Gaussian simulation up to the present day to include some emerging technologies such as multipoint geostatistics. ** and Ron Boese of Fugro-Jason then showed how seismic data could be used via inversion techniques to populate porosity into interwell areas with reference to a West Texas carbonate field case history. The theme was continued by Dominic Lowden of Schlumberger who also showed how porosity modelling a carbonate field, this time offshore Mexicowas performed via impedence inversion, but he began by showing how acquisition techniques could be optimised to ensure the best outcome.
The thorny issue of permeability upscaling was tackled by Alan Johnson of Shell who demonstrated how statisticians had already answered a perennial problems of petrophysicists, what averaging technique to use, arithmetic, geometric or harmonic?: if one is to best match test data. Phil Ringrose of Statoil showed how fine scale core descriptions and wireline data could be translated to meaningful near wellbore models via the SBED software. Again a case study was presented, this time from the Tyrihans Oil field offshore Norway where core photos had been translated via a generic lithofacies library to a near wellbore model that could be used to generate fine scale properties and allow proper unpscaling. Mike Goldwater of Auric Hydrates concluded the formal part of the Agenda with a look at how reservoir engineers could build simple quick-look reservoir models, including multiple realisations, from petrophysical data to simulate fracture stimulation efficiency and allow ranking of results to decide the best forward plans.
There was then a more informal discussion to allow more comments from the floor at the end of the day before the attendees retired to the library for refreshments.
So all-in-all the seminar was very well attended and showcased a good number of high quality presentations on the growing technology of 3D reservoir modelling. Thanks from the committee in particular go to Steve Cannon for championing the event in providing the defining vision which lead to this success. Thanks also go to all the speakers are due for giving up valuable time to present their work.