ALBERT

Description: Judy Creek, located in west-central Alberta, is one of the largest reservoirs in the Swan Hills oil field. Judy Creek is an isolated reef complex of the Upper Devonian Swan Hills Formation. This mature field has about 350 wells drilled and nearly 6000 m (19,685 ft) of cores and thus provides a good database for depositional facies analysis and testing methods for integrating descriptive and quantitative data in facies modeling. General depositional facies and sequence stratigraphy of Judy Creek have been studied quite extensively. However, no three-dimensional numeric facies model has been built to guide the field development. One of the objectives in constructing such a model for this study was to establish a close linkage between the facies depositional analysis and modeling. As a matter of fact, there have been significant disconnects between descriptive analysis and numeric modeling in the exploration and production. Depositional facies analysis has focused on conceptual understanding for prospect generation and reservoir delineation, whereas facies modeling has emphasized data mining for field development. In this study, a method that integrates the spatial propensity from the depositional conceptual models and facies data from the wells is used to bridge the gap between the depositional analysis and stochastic modeling. Such integration has proven to be critical in building realistic subsurface models in Judy Creek because it helped improve the estimation of subsurface resources. Y. Zee Ma received his Ph.D. in mathematical geology in 1987 from the Institute National Polytechnique de Lorraine (INPL) in France, a bachelor degrees in geology from China University of Geoscience, and master degrees in remote sensing and geostatistics from INPL and Ecole de Mines de Paris in France. He worked as a consultant for Elf (now part of Total S.A.) in Pau, France, and ExxonMobil in Houston before joining Schlumberger, where he is a principal geoscientist. His interests include geostatistics, seismic attributes, depositional facies analysis and modeling, reservoir characterization and modeling, subsurface resource evaluation, and uncertainty analysis. He has conducted, or advised on, nearly 100 reservoir studies for major, independent, and national oil companies from around the world. Andrew Seto is currently the manager, reservoir studies, of Pengrowth Corporation. He obtained a B.Sc. (engineering) degree, with distinction, in 1980 and an M.Sc. (engineering) degree in 1985 both from the University of Alberta. Andrew has 24 years of experience in the petroleum industry, working for major oil and gas companies in various reservoir engineering and management capacities. He specializes in integrated reservoir studies, depletion planning, reservoir management, and reserve evaluation of conventional oil and gas, thermal, and other enhanced oil recovery projects in Canada and around the world. Ernest Gomez has B.A. and M.S. degrees in geology from the State University of New York at New Paltz and Northern Arizona University, respectively. During his career, he has worked with several operators, including Cities Service and Home Petroleum. He is currently a reservoir geology advisor with Schlumberger Data and Consulting Services in Denver, Colorado.