Shell Colloquium Series

Spring 2012
April 5, 3:30 pm, Room A235, Sarkeys Energy Center

Andrew Cullen
Chesapeake Energy

The Full Spectrum: The Impact of an Integrated Field Study on Exploration and Region Geology

The skillsets of petroleum geoscientists are ever-broadening in response to the emergence of new technologies and shifting economic fundamentals. For example, the shale-gas revolution that swept through North America during the previous 5 years was driven by the convergence of multiple new technologies that unlocked vast natural gas reserves produced directly from highly mature organic-rich siliceous and carbonate mudrocks. Although this revolution will reshape Americas energy and transportation infrastructure in the coming decades, it is largely spent in North America as operators have secured their held-byproduction acreage positions and curtailed development activity owing to a withering collapse in natural gas prices. The resultant value disparity between oil and gas (40:1) relative to its energy equivalent (6:1) has driven industry to shift rapidly towards liquids-rich plays. These plays are widespread, geologically diverse, and represent migrated hydrocarbons trapped in the low permeability reservoirs often, but not necessarily, in close association with their parental source rocks; horizontal drilling and fracture stimulation are enabling technologies. Liquids-rich plays pose much greater technical challenges than do shale gas plays; one must consider spatial variations in formation water salinity, gas-oil ratios, multiphase fluid flow, relative permeability, dual-wettability systems, and the post-entrapment modification of fluids by water-washing, evaporative fractionation, and vapor phase exsolution. This talk reviews some of the fundamentals of petroleum geology before dissecting a conventional fault-bounded trap from which shallow marine sandstones produce at multiple levels. I will show how the integration of a series of multi-disciplinary studies of this field affected not only development decisions, but also provided fundamental input for risking exploration prospects and led to new insights to the regional structural framework. These studies were the catalyst that initiated a major transformation of my career at Royal Dutch Shell that ultimately took me from Senior Production Seismologist to Principal Regional Geologist for Southeast Asia. Given the increasingly sophisticated analytical techniques used to solve complex problems, it is axiomatic that those petroleum geologists with broad skillsets, rigorously grounded in fundamentals, will be the ones most capable of adapting across the spectrum of changing demands from pursuing liquids-rich plays, working on super-critical fluid carbon dioxide sequestration, to exploring frontier basins; or simply optimizing the development of conventional fields.

ConocoPhillips School of Geology & Geophysics

The University of Oklahoma 100 East Boyd St., Ste 710, Norman, Oklahoma 73019 Phone: (405) 325-3253; Fax: (405) 325-3140