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RCRL Convenes 2016 Annual Sponsors Meeting and Field Trip

October 20, 2016
Core Workshop

RCRL members participating in the 2016 core workshop at the BEG-CRC facility.

The Reservoir Characterization Research Laboratory (RCRL) held its Annual Sponsors Meeting September 25–30 in Austin at the Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG). The 6-day meeting drew 65 participants to its four main events, which included an all-day core workshop, two days of technical presentations, a poster session, and a 3-day field trip to the Glass Mountains–Marathon Basin area.

The RCRL Core Workshop featured Texas cores of varied geologic ages (i.e., Lower Ordovician, Wolfcampian–Leonardian, Guadalupian Permian, and Early and Late Cretaceous): superb platform top shelfal carbonate reservoirs of the Late Permian Grayburg Formation; ooid grainstones of the Aptian Glen Rose; and continued transition basinward into mixed carbonate–siliciclastic cores from the Wolfcampian, Bone Spring, and Brushy and Cherry Canyons in the Permian Basin and downslope lithofacies within the Cretaceous Glen Rose Formation, along with Upper Cretaceous deeper-water carbonates of the Buda, Austin Chalk, and Eagle Ford mudrocks. Bob Loucks presented core from the Lower Ordovician Ellenburger and Viola. These intervals provide examples of paleokarst systems that lie just below unconventional mudrocks of the Mississippian-age Barnett Shale and are a known source of reservoir production and completion issues in mudrock systems. Cores were presented by RCRL principals and students, enabling active discussion with sponsors at all levels. Sponsors also received a 72-page Core Workshop Abstract Volume.. 

core workshop

RCRL Researcher Bob Loucks discussing cores of the Ordovician Ellenburger Formation.

The first day of technical presentations highlighted the work of researchers and students from the past year and varied in scale from continental-scale stratigraphy to micropore systems. Xavier Janson and colleagues presented work on Miocene and Paleogene platform carbonates and mixed slope–to–deepwater systems along the Northwest Shelf of Australia; Oligocene to Miocene of East Java, Indonesia; and two Miocene basins in Turkey. Greg Hurd, 2016 RCRL PhD, highlighted the post-Miocene shelf-to-basin sediment accumulation associated with the Permian Cutoff and Avalon Formations in the Delaware Basin. The concept of shelf-to-basin connections along the southwestern Delaware Basin was also highlighted by Charlie Kerans in a new study on the Wolfcampian Wylie Mountains. Additional presentations of carbonate-reservoir architecture within Permian outcrop and subsurface studies were given by PhD students Yawen He and Ben Smith. Bob Loucks concluded the Monday session with an introduction to Albian-age microbiolite biostromes in outcrop on the northern margin of the Maverick Basin. A 360-page Extended Abstract Volume, which highlights the applicability and main research results of each of the presentations, offers the most current state-of-the-science findings of the RCRL research group.

The first day of technical presentations featured 21 technical posters presented at the BEG, including work by RCRL researchers and students as well as collaborative studies involving the RCRL group. This portion of the annual meeting has become a favorite because it gives sponsors a chance to interact on a more personal level with all members of the RCRL group and provides an opportunity to see RCRL students in action—a unique way for sponsors to interview potential work colleagues while providing critical and instructive feedback to improve RCRL research.

Technical Presentations

Technical presentations for the RCRL Sponsors.

The second day of technical presentations highlighted reservoir-scale characterization issues ranging from heterogeneous facies distributions surrounding Albian-age microbiolites developed on the northern Maverick Basin to facies distribution and rock property variability within Pleistocene-age deposits exposed in outcrops of West Caicos and San Salvador, Bahamas. Detailed stratigraphic work on West Caicos questions the validity of models that suggest continuous and linear deposition through time as more than 40% of the visible island of West Caicos was deposited in a span of 3,000 years or less. The research also notes that porosity is reduced dramatically during exposure events by meteoric cements, causing an increase in rock strength and making young, unburied carbonates brittle and susceptible to fracturing and large block development. These findings are key for the development of geomechanical models of modern and ancient carbonate systems.

High-resolution chemostratigraphy within the Upper Cretaceous Austin Chalk and Eagle Ford Formations—along with detailed nonmatrix pore-system characterization of the Ellenburger, Viola, and Barnett—were presented as examples of how stratigraphic systems control critical aspects of carbonate reservoir characterization. Fracture development in these systems is also a critical component to hydrocarbon production. While many have proposed that the tectonic diversity of Texas must be important, outcrop and satellite photo characterizations of South Texas demonstrate that significant brittle deformation has occurred following the Permian and must be considered in the design and development of conventional and unconventional reservoirs of the Permian and Maverick Basins. The final technical presentation was a field-trip overview of the Glass Mountains and Marathon Basin, highlighting the mixed carbonate–siliciclastic sedimentation associated with the Early to Late Permian in the southern Delaware and Val Verde Basins.

Poster session

PhD candidate Yawen He presents her research to RCRL members during the Monday evening poster seesion.

Following technical presentations, a wrap-up and feedback session was presented in an open forum, where several companies provided assessments on presentations and offered input on future directions that best suited their companies’ interests. The feedback continues today via e-mail or conversations with RCRL researchers. All ideas are collected and incorporated into the RCRL Research Prospectus, and within a brief overview presentation (coming soon to the RCRL website).

For the final 3 days of the meeting, RCRL researchers and students were joined by 24 sponsors on a field trip to the Glass Mountains and Marathon Basin to examine the development of the Guadalupian mixed-carbonate and siliciclastic southern margin of the Delaware Basin and to study the role of preexisting structural fabric on younger deformation events. The Glass Mountains are the stratotype locations of many of the Wolfcampian, Leonardian, and Guadalupian stratigraphic units. Because exposures within the Glass Mountains are all located on private property and have been off-limits for decades, this field trip was a unique opportunity to compare the southern Delaware Basin Permian to the more studied northwestern exposures in the Guadalupe Mountains.

Post-doc researcher Alex Hairabian, along with RCRL researcher Xavier Janson, led 2 days of field examination of the margin-to-slope systems of the Early Permian, which initiated the well-known Capitan Reef system of the Middle Permian. Spectacular dolomitized clinoforms up to 150 m high show the transition from the reef front to toe of slope. Unique to the southern Permian basin is the abundance of siliciclastic deposits on the slope and basin, which is markedly different from the well-documented reciprocal sedimentation model of the Capitan system in the Guadalupe Mountains.

field trip

Alex Hairibian and Xavier Janson present slope systems on the sponsors field trip.

On the return drive to Austin, RCRL researcher Chris Zahm led the stop to examine the Permian expression of the Ouachita–Marathon orogeny, exploring the infamous Tesnus Formation—the first accumulated sediments from the South American plate (Llanoria) deposited within the closing Gondwana margin of the Early Permian. The main structural fabric highlights the discordance between Permian tectonics and the Mesozoic and Cenozoic fabric present today. After the Permian, erosion and denudation of the Ouachita–Marathon mountain belt left a flat landscape on which the Cretaceous seaway deposited significant carbonate strata. Late Cretaceous orogenesis (Laramide) caused reactivation of the Permian structures and is expressed in high-intensity, low-offset faulting in the foreland, which field-trip participants examined in a road cut exposure north of Sanderson, Texas. On their trip home, the group also explored the Cretaceous Comanche Shelf.


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