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Exploration & Production: The Oil & Gas Review - 2003, Volume 2
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The Next Generation–4-D
When budding geologists starting college during this decade enter the energy industry, theirs will be a 4-D world of instrumented fields and realtime data streaming. They will face many exciting challenges, including the following:
- linking matrix properties, diagenetic process and products and fractures of all scales to result in total system permeability understanding;
- evolving from a scalar (magnitude) singlecomponent seismic world, through a vector (magnitude and direction) multicomponent seismic world, into a tensor (nth dimensional space) aniso-tropic seismic world to improve our knowledge of complex permeability and dynamic fluid systems;
- processing, interpreting and integrating fourcomponent, 3-D (4-C3-D), nine-component, 3-D (9-C3-D) and nine-component, 4-D (9-C4-D) seismic data with other subsurface data using rock and fluid physics, rather than statistical approximations;
- applying land and air-based laser, radar, electromagnetic and other remote sensing technology to advanced 3-D outcrop understanding, and linking that understanding to the subsurface;
- designing reservoir management plans, including risk and economic analysis, that take full advantage of the 4-D reservoir understanding; and
- applying the remarkable knowledge from the energy industry to broader societal challenges such as sequestration of greenhouse gases, efficient management of the commodity of water and safe disposal of radioactive wastes.
Broader Impacts
For the past 50 years, those in the energy industry have certainly been acquiring all types of surface and subsurface data, cutting-edge computer hardware and software and advanced operational technology to take us to the most remote regions on the planet. As the transition to a gas economy for the nation and the world continues over the next several decades, advanced characterisation, which takes advantage of all of this data, will be critical in order to understand the increasingly complex hydrocarbon reservoirs that will be encountered. Perhaps the medical profession provides an apt metaphor for the energy profession: diagnose before prescribing. Following the metaphor, the 21stcentury challenge for reservoir characterisation and the energy industry must then be to prescribe intelligent, integrated, economic and environmentally sound treatment that takes full advantage of reservoir diagnoses.
Category:
Reservoir Engineering
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Dr Scott W Tinker is Director of
the Bureau of Economic Geology at
The University of Texas at Austin. He
is the State Geologist of Texas and
holds the Allday Chair in Subsurface
Geology in the university's Department
of Geological Sciences. Among the
achievements of his 19-year career
in the oil industry, he has received
best paper recognition in two major
scientific journals and has been a
distinguished lecturer for the American
Association of Petroleum Geologists
(AAPG) and the Society of Petroleum
Engineers (SPE). Dr Tinker is a
member of many professional
societies, boards and committees and
is a certified professional geologist
and certified petroleum geologist.
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