Education

CSEG DoodleTrain

Hydraulic Fracturing and Microseismic

Instructor: Mike Jones/Shawn Maxwell
Date: November 4 - 5, 2010
Duration: 2 days
Members (early bird/price): $700/$900 CDN (plus GST)
Non-Members (early bird/price): $800/$1000 CDN (plus GST)

Venue: Schlumberger, Turner Valley 2&3 (ground floor) – 525 -3rd Ave SW
Time: 8:00am - 5:00pm

Course Description:

The increasing interest in shales as reservoir rocks, and the use of horizontal wells and active fracture treaments, has led to a rapid growth in the application of microseismic monitoring projects to better understand what these interventions are actually doing in the subsurface. In the absence of direct monitoring of fracture growth, every conclusion about fracture geometry is based on untestable inference.

The course will cover some basic earthquake monitoring ideas and the methods used to locate and quantify them, and then extend this to the monitoring of microseismic events caused by hydraulic fracturing activity, or reservoir movement through depletion, injection or other externally imposed activities. It will cover the basics of how microseismic events may be located in 3 dimensional space and how the data may be further processed to determine and use additional seismic attributes including source parameters and focal mechanisms. The operational details of how such data can be acquired will be discussed and both borehole and surface monitoring methods will be covered.

This course will be of interest to Completions Engineers, Geophysicists, Geologists and reservoir Engineers who are involved with shale plays, horizontal wells or large fracture treatments. No advanced mathematical or seismic knowledge is required, though a numerate literacy is assumed.

Presenter / Instructor Biography:

Shawn Maxwell is Chief Geophysicist and Advisor for Schlumberger's Hydraulic Fracture Monitoring corporate business unit, and is based in Calgary, Alberta. Shawn is responsible for development, implementation and culturing of Schlumberger's StimMAP service. Prior to Schlumberger, he served as Chief Geophysicist with Pinnacle Technologies in Calgary; Manager of Petroleum Services with ESG in Kingston, Ontario; and Lecturer at Keele University in England. Shawn was awarded a Ph.D. in earthquake seismology, a M.Sc. in Engineering Physics and a B.Sc. in Geophysics from Queen's University. He has over 20 years experience in a broad range of microseismic monitoring applications, including mapping hydraulic fractures, fracture networks, steam floods, gas floods, water floods, casing failures, reservoir compaction, gas storage and sequestration, excavation damage around underground tunnels, and mining induced seismicity and rockbursts. Dr. Maxwell has been active in projects throughout North America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and his expertise includes velocity tomography of active and passive seismicity, seismic raytracing, synthetic seismograms, in addition to microseismic source characterization, data acquisition, processing and interpretation. Shawn has authored numerous publications in journals and professional abstracts.

Mike Jones has worked as a Geophysicist with Schlumberger for over 20 yrs, covering all aspects of borehole acoustic measurements. He has presented and authored several technical papers on VSPs, AVO, shear waves and anisotropy.

Contact Information:

Any inquiries about likely course content or other matters should be directed to Mike Jones (jonesm1@slb.com).