The Bureau of Economic Geology’s Tight Oil Resource Assessment (TORA) program recently held its spring meeting with over 100 virtual attendees, including sponsor organizations from the United States, China, Colombia, Canada, and France. The meeting comprised 17 technical presentations, including a topical deep dive into novel, geologic rule–based machine learning workflows applicable to geoscience data.
Presentations covered various aspects of geology, geophysics, petrophysics, reservoir engineering, economics, data analytics, and machine learning under broad conference themes of Data Quality, Basin Architecture, Integrated Workflows, and Changing Business Environment and New Opportunities. The meeting focused on the Permian Basin but also provided an update on the resource estimates and drilling maturity of all major U.S. tight oil and gas plays and new concepts and methods applicable to all such plays, including identification of subseismic faults, 3D seismic inversion and interpretation, formation evaluation (including impacts of water salinity), fluid typing, new automated production outlook tools, well inventory analysis, and the reliability of publicly available data.
In addition to presenting basin-scale maps and 3D geomodels, TORA researchers also discussed the past, present, and future of Permian Basin energy economics, including the analysis and drilling potential of remaining well inventory in various productivity- and estimated ultimate recovery (EUR)–defined bins. Understanding the subsurface remains critically important, as it controls productivity along with completion intensity. The implications of growing environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) requirements on operators were also discussed.
For more information about the TORA research consortium, please contact Dr. Emery Goodman.
Young’s modulus derived from integrated seismic inversion and ML.
Delaware Basin Wolfcamp A Original Oil in Place.
