Thursday, August 25, 2011

Phase, phase, phase

My 2002 Seismos column in Leading Edge describing various seismic meanings of the word phase can be found here.

Shane drain

After a 14 hour day at the University of Houston and finishing my 8:30 class last night, I got together with some old Arkansas buddies (Shane, Eddie and John) at the Flying Saucer in downtown Houston.  With four geologists you know the conversation will eventually take a turn toward the oil and gas business.   One recurring theme was the relation of world population and oil production as shown in this plot from another blog entry.

Toward the end of the evening words alone were insufficient to convey the complex ideas springing up. Beer coasters were called to duty as makeshift sketch pads, examples below.

The concept of the Flying Saucer is plates on all walls and ceiling with witty sayings.  My favorite spotted last night: There are three kinds of mathematicians in the world: Those who can count and those who can't. 

A fine session with many of the world's problems solved.  Thanks boys.

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Shane's concept of drainage patterns in a fracked horizontal well over time.

Eddie explains a mysterious horizontal well with a cross section drawing(top) and Shane pushes the drainage pattern theory again (below).

Shane mathematics.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Field Camp Video

I spent a week at the University of Houston Geophysics Field Camp organized by Prof. Rob Stewart.  Here is a short video compiled about the experience.  Enjoy.


Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Keynote at 2012 ASEG

As part of my 2012 world lecture tour for the SEG DISC, I have been asked to deliver a keynote presentation at the Australian SEG meeting being held 26th – 29th February 2012 in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

Title:
Aspects of Reservoir Geophysics for CO2 Sequestration

Abstract:
In this talk the nature and magnitude of the atmospheric CO2 problem is developed, leading to the push for geologic CO2 sequestration efforts. As an example, our work at the Dickman Field site in Ness County, Kansas is presented. This involves extensive attribute analysis of 3D seismic data, geological property estimation and gridded model-building, followed by flow simulation on regular and refined grids. The goal is to estimate the potential volume of CO2 that could be injected at Dickman as a template for mid-continent sites in the U.S., and quantitative evaluation of the subsurface fate of injected CO2 over long-range simulations lasting several hundred years.

Monday, August 1, 2011

Earthquake CDF

This interactive Earthquake document is pretty cool. To view and run it you may need to install the CDF Player (free).

CDF (computational document format) is Wolfram's model for sharing reproducible research documents. In a more general sense, this has been a Jon Claerbout goal for many years. But as you will see from the link, the reproducible research community does not want any commercial software to be involved, only open source tools.