Carbonate Reservoir Characterization

Carbonate reservoirs are considered to be the most significant source of hydrocarbon production for this century. This course is offered to provide an introduction to carbonate reservoir evaluation through use of academic and industry course material. Basic terminology and concepts will be taught through lectures, practical exercises and self-study assignments: The geology and diagenesis of carbonates. Sequence stratigraphy. Petrophysics and seismics in carbonates. What challenges do carbonate reservoirs give? Examples of different carbonate reservoirs will be used to demonstrate the importance of integrating engineering and geoscience data and understanding in effective reservoir management. The integration of all disciplines will be stressed through lectures, practical exercises and self-study assignments. Data will be provided for practical exercises on evaluation of carbonate reservoirs.

Ingress:
The course gives competence in evaluation of carbonate reservoirs. These can be very different from clastic sandstone reservoirs and contains more than 50% of the petroleum reserves of the earth. The students learn about the geology and the petrophysics of such rocks. They are also given basic knowledge of reservoir geomodelling, uncertainty analysis, risk assessment and seismics. At the end of the semester they are going to do a large project where they will evaluate data from a carbonate reservoir using all available information. This project is conducted over a few weeks, and more working hours than normally must be expected. The extra hours will be compensated by free time in other periods.

Knowledge:
The students are expected to understand data types and aspects of carbonate reservoirs. They should be able to work with such data to evaluate the potential of such a reservoir. They are working together with other students with a complementary competence - just like in the industry.

Skills:
The students will get insights into the complexity of carbonate reservoirs and how to evaluate data from such reservoirs, how to systematize data, interpret and build a geological reservoir model for carbonate reservoirs, integrate petrophysical and seismic data, in addition to get an understanding of the consequences in selection of different depositional models, distribution of reservoir properties, and the theories in building of a reservoir model.

General competence:
Working together with other students with different competence in the evaluation of petroleum reservoirs is an important competence in the oil industry. The industry is asking for this. The competence on carbonate reservoirs is generally small in Norway. Not many universities in the world can give the student the competence they get here.

Lectures and exercises, self study assignments. Data sets will be provided for group work and self study to teach the methods of "how to evaluate a carbonate reservoir". Compulsory group project in the semester. Lectures are held in English if international master's students attend the course.