SPE Dinner Meeting 26 March

Dear members,
We would like to invite you and your colleagues to the�March London Section�evening meeting for a presentation by a�Distinguished Lecturer on�use of fractals in reservoir engineering and a talk on ‘How to be a Petroleum Detective’.
The event will be held at Imperial College; Royal School of Mines, Prince Consort Road, London, SW7 2BP.
The Royal School of Mines is about 15 minutes� walk from South Kensington tube station via Exhibition Road and Prince Consort Road.
Please, read more about the�agenda, the�talk content, and the�booking information�below.

Regards
Tim Lines
SPE London Section – Programme Chairman
Email:�tim.lines@oilfieldinternational.com

Agenda:�

Venue:�Department of Earth Science and Engineering, Imperial College London
Directions�: Please note, the main entrance to the Department is via the�Royal School of Mines Building on Prince Consort Road.

Booking:� All booking must be paid in advance and�online please via Eventbrite.

Email:�katespe@aol.com
Cost �34 for SPE/PESGB/EI members, �44 non-members, �19 unemployed members. Non refundable �5 for students booking by Friday March 22 (�19 after). All tickets have an additional Eventbrite fee.

BEFORE DINNER:
Talk 1: 5:00pm-6:30pm
‘How to be a Petroleum Detective’.
Brian Moffatt, CEO Petrophase

During Exploration and Production projects we often view technical challenges through the lens of our home discipline; we say oil properties and reserves estimation belong in realm of petroleum engineering while biomarkers lie in the domain of geochemistry. However Mother Nature sprinkles her clues indiscriminately across all disciplines so many technical problems refuse to sit neatly in a single domain, indeed the expertise from several may be needed to understand the placement and properties of petroleum. This is why so many reservoir systems are wrongly characterised. It is not simply a problem of QC-ing a sample but of making sense of samples and data in context.

A different perspective may be taken by assuming the role of a Petroleum Detective. The good detective questions the data and gathers evidence from a wide variety of sources to build a credible and defensible case. It is not just rounding up the usual suspects!� Several case studies are presented which follow this approach, revealing what is really lurking underground and the implications to production that would missed from a superficial review.� Cracking these �cases� is shown to have enormous economic impact.

Brian Moffatt�started in the oil patch commissioning a PVT laboratory and operating well site sampling before managing a team focused on petroleum fluids research. Later Brian worked as a petroleum engineer with BG Group and Helix-RDS before founding Petrophase in 2004 with a vision to link disparate disciplines under petroleum fluid studies. By combining expertise with joined-up thinking across PVT, thermodynamic modelling, sampling, geochemistry, petroleum engineering and surface processing, Petrophase has achieved a dozen world first solutions and won four industry awards. Brian has presented many industry talks especially at YSPE events and Petrophase has managed student MSc projects at Imperial College, Heriot-Watt and Portsmouth University. Many scientific papers on oil and gas behaviour have been published usually with an interdisciplinary twist.

AFTER DINNER:
Talk2: 7:15pm-8:45-pm
Using fractals to determine a reservoir’s hydrocarbon distribution.
Steve Cuddy, Distinguished Lecturer, Baker Hughes

In order to determine a field�s hydrocarbon in place it is necessary to model the distribution of fluids throughout the reservoir.� A water saturation vs. height (Swh) function provides this for the reservoir model.� A good Swh function ensures the three independent sources of fluid distribution data are consistent.� These being the core, formation pressure and electrical log data.� The Swh function must be simple to apply, especially in reservoirs where it is difficult to map permeability or where there appears to be multiple contacts.� It must accurately upscale the log and core derived water saturations to the reservoir model cell sizes.��

This presentation clarifies the often misunderstood definitions for the free-water-level, transition zone and irreducible water saturation.� Using capillary pressure theory and the concept of fractals, a practical Swh function is derived.� Logs and core data from eleven fields, with very different porosity and permeability characteristics, depositional environments and geological age are compared.� This study demonstrated how this Swh function is independent of permeability and litho-facies type and accurately describes the reservoir fluid distribution.�

The shape of the Swh function shows that of the transition zone is related more to pore geometry rather than porosity or permeability alone. Consequently, this Swh function gives insights into a reservoir�s quality as determined by its pore architecture.� A number of case studies are presented showing the excellent match between the function and well data.� The function makes an accurate prediction of water saturations even in wells where the resistivity log was not run due to well conditions.� The function defines the free water level, the hydrocarbon to water contact, net reservoir and the irreducible water saturation for the reservoir model. The fractal function provides a simple way to quality control electrical log and core data and justifies using core plug sized samples to model water saturations on the reservoir scale.��

Steve Cuddy�is an Honorary Research Fellow at Aberdeen University where he holds a doctorate in petrophysics. He also holds BSc (Hons.) in physics and a BSc in astrophysics and philosophy. He is currently a Principal Petrophysicist with Baker Hughes and has 40 years’ industry experience in formation evaluation and reservoir description. He has authored several SPE and SPWLA papers and carried out more than 200 reservoir studies.