Thursday 28 July, 6pm
Stable Bar, The Three Tuns, Henley-on-Thames

Field to Field work: how understanding of field behaviour led to development of sedimentology models – via a field analogue and field course
With Stephanie Kape, BG Group

Fluvial sands- braided or meandering? Right?

In the mid noughties, BG Group held an extensive portfolio of non-operated, North Sea production in fluvial reservoirs of the Triassic Skaggerak Formation. Over time it was apparent that the production behaviour of these fluvial reservoirs was not the same and the bucket description of ‘braided fluvial sands’ was inadequate to describe the fields or build predictive models. Fortunately this coincided with publication of new work based on the Oligo-Miocene of the Ebro basin, which sought to understand the changes in fluvial architecture across a distributive system. This work enabled a step change in the understanding of the field production behaviour, and was seen by Nautilus Ltd as a good basis for an applied sedimentology course to explore these themes further in a field setting. However, difficulties in explaining the current, academic stratigraphic models in the field to industry professionals led to the development of new stratigraphic models for fluvial accumulation, published in 2013.

This talk runs through the evolution of the stratigraphic models and production data – illustrated with field analogues. It is a true example of fruitful of collaboration between industry and academia, showing how the science in both has been pushed forward through field work.