Education Week 2008

Petroleum Exploration in fold and Thrust Belts (SC0808)

REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN

Instructor: Peter B. Jones
Date: October 28 - 30, 2008
Time: 8:00am to 4:30pm
Duration: 3 Days
Max. Attendance: 20

CSPG Member Earlybird Registration Deadline: September 15, 2008
CSPG Member Registration Deadline: October 15, 2008
Course Fee: CSPG Member Earlybird: $1,100 +GST | CSPG Member: $1,200 +GST

Location: TBA

Course Outline:

The course is designed to develop the skills need to create new plays and prospects from old and new data worldwide. These techniques include the ability to visualize structures in three dimensions and to examine traditional and current concepts and styles of interpretation. Discussion is encouraged for there are many unanswered questions and unquestioned answers that are fundamental to exploration geology. Examples will show how basic principles can be are overlooked in the interpretation of outcrop, well and seismic data. Application of basic principles can lead to the development of new prospects and re-evaluation of individual structures and regions.

The course is designed for geologists, engineers, geophysicists and processors as well as their supervisors involved in exploration of domestic, frontier, and overseas areas of complex geological structure. A short introductory video ("Birth of the Rockies") follows registration. It is followed by a mixture of informal PowerPoint presentations separated by workshop exercises and breaks. Hands-on exercises utilize actual and simulated exploration problems. Material is selected to develop a three-dimensional understanding of geologic structures in Canada and other countries, with a view to creating new structural prospects in domestic and foreign exploration. Case histories illustrate exploration failures and successes, and evolving styles of structural interpretation, thin- and thick-skinned modes of deformation and combinations thereof, pitfalls in seismic and subsurface interpretation are discussed. Hundreds of original diagrams and air photographs illustrate the book of course notes and PowerPoint presentations. A separate book of workshop exercises provides extra material for ongoing reference and study.

This material, regularly updated, has been presented to more than 40 organizations in 34 countries, most recently by special invitation of OGDCL (Pakistan National Oil Company) in October 2007. Over the years, participants have contributed their own insights into the understanding of structural geology worldwide.

Course Outline

Day One

Mechanical properties of rock materials and geometry of layered sedimentary rocks.
Importance of layering, pitfalls created by fault terminology and geometry, thrust tectonics and the role of overpressure in deformation.
Fault sequence in time and place and 4-D propagation.
Detachments and duplex structures- the most important reservoirs in fold and thrust belts.
Wedge Tectonics and its enhancement of hydrocarbon potential worldwide.
The ancient curse of the "sledrunner fault" and other problems in interpretation and correlation.

Day Two

Extensional structures in compressional terrains and vice-versa, basement involved structures, real and apparent, pseudo-unconformities, dating of structural events.
Inversion structures in compressional regimes.
Structures associated with strike-slip faults, flower structures, folds and folding, mud and salt tectonics in cratons and fold belts.
Gravity-driven and impact structures as reservoirs.
Exploration methods: Developing new exploration plays from old seismic and geologic data.
Interpretation of subsurface geology from surface geology and cross-sections.

Day Three

Balanced cross-sections, analog models, and their limitations.
Exploration case histories.
Human and cultural factors in geologic interpretation.
The improbability factor (IF): a valuable tool for re-interpretation of data.
Group discussion of participants' own seismic profiles and other material is encouraged, if available.

Instructor Bio(s):

Peter B. Jones, D. Sc., F. G. S., FGSA, P. Geol.

Academician of Russian Academy of Natural Sciences

President, International Tectonic Consultants Ltd.

Peter Jones is a researcher and consulting geologist specializing in petroleum exploration in areas of complex structures, especially in deformed belts. Based in Calgary, Canada, he has been involved in petroleum and minerals exploration and development with two years spent in academia. Initially working for BP, BP Alaska, Amerada-Hess, and Dome Petroleum in Calgary, he was a wellsite geologist, field party chief, and senior project geologist leading subsurface and field studies in western and Arctic Canada, Alaska, Ethiopia, and the Canadian shield.

In 1979 he formed International Tectonic Consultants Ltd. to specialize in petroleum exploration in areas of complex structures, primarily associated with thrust and fold belts. This work has taken him to the U. S. A., Russia, China, France, Poland, U. K., Austria, Philippines, and Indonesia. Japan, India, Mexico, Spain, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela, between working in Calgary on projects in those and other countries, involving compressional, extensional, and strike-slip structures. Clients have included BP/Amoco, Mobil, Superior, Imperial Oil, Canadian Hunter, Devon, Nexen, Sherritt International, Huffco, and many smaller domestic and foreign oil companies. Jones has a B. Sc. from Nottingham University, U. K. and a D. Sc. from Colorado School of Mines, U. S. A., with geophysics as a minor subject. Following two years in academia he returned to the Canadian oil industry, working on field studies and exploration projects in the Cordillera, Arctic and Canadian Shield, involving more than twenty summers spent in the field. His publications, more than forty of them, arose from his work in petroleum exploration. He achieved international recognition for his demonstration that the "triangle zone" at the outer edge of the Albert foothills was not a local oddity but a common, logical, and productive element of fold and thrust belts worldwide. Described by Ian Vann (VP technology of BP) as the "most important breakthrough in structural geology in a decade", this 1982 paper was also described as "the biggest advance in 50 years" by Dr. Richard Powers of the USGS. The resultant revision of structural interpretations that followed resulted in major new oil discoveries in an unknown number of countries but acknowledged in the USSR, Cuba, and Argentina.

In partnership with Helmut Linsser, a geophysicist and computer analyst, Jones co-authored the first commercially available software for construction of balanced cross-sections through fold and thrust belts. Initially a mainframe program, it was sold to sixteen major oil companies, and subsequently, as a PC-based program to the same and many other oil companies, national geological surveys, and universities.

In 1997 he was awarded the Douglas medal of the Canadian Society of Petroleum geologists, for "having contributed enormously to our understanding and evolution of deformed belts in general and the Canadian Rocky Mountain fold and thrust belt in particular". In 1998 he was elected an Academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, for contributions to the tectonics of Russia. In 1986 and 2003, Jones lectured at China University of Geosciences (Wuhan and Beijing), Northwest China University (Xian), and Nanjing University. A licenced pilot, Peter has been flying in the Rockies and elsewhere since 1979, photographing geological structures.