Chapter 1 - Deepwater Reservoirs in E&P

01-01a - Course Introduction (10 min.) Sample Lesson
01-01b - Confined Slope Complexes (25 min.)
01-02 - Steer Head Cross-Sectional Profiles (12 min.)
01-03 - Precursive Sand Sheets (7 min.)
01-04 - Basal Debrites (7 min.)
01-05 - Lower Channel Complex Channels (5 min.)
01-06 - Stacking Patterns in Channel Elements (14 min.)
01-07 - Late-Stage Channel Elements (12 min.)
01-08 - Levee Growth (37 min.)
01-09 - Channel Complex Origins (9 min.)
01-10 - Model Variability (6 min.)
01-11 - New Unified Models (17 min.) Quiz: 01-11 - New Unified Models

Deepwater Reservoirs in E&P / Chapter 1 - Deepwater Reservoirs in E&P

Lesson 01-01a - Course Introduction

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Transcript

01. Lesson 1.01a: Course Introduction 02. Instructor Background 03. Talk Structure and Objectives

01. Lesson 1.01a: Course Introduction

Hello and welcome to this class on Advanced Deep Water Training. My name is Bryan Cronin, Professor Bryan Cronin, and my class today is a sort of reduced seminar which focuses on G&G focused presentation on deep-water, slope channel complexes and canyons.
And the purpose of this talk is to give you a sort of highlight flavor seminar on all areas of detail but in a very focused way, looking at a specific type of a very common and very productive reservoir. And to do that, I would normally have a more extensive class. So this summary is just to give you a flavor for a longer 5-day classroom of about 30 hours or so with exercises, which I also deliver. But today, for you in this recording, I'm going to go through, for about 2 hours with breaks in between, a focused look at deep water slope channel complexes as depot systems, using examples from the modern seafloor and from outcrops and things like that, and very much a focus on the subsurface. So that's what you're going to get today with lots of slides to illustrate from different parts of the world.
Just a little bit more on myself before I continue with the presentation. You can contact me on the email address there, should you wish to. There's a LinkedIn QR code also on the opening slide, which you can see there, which you can link to my LinkedIn profile.

02. Instructor Background

So my background on the second slide here: I was an academic for about 15 years in total. I was based at the University of Aberdeen, where I exited as a professor. And we ran deep water research groups with PhD students working in different parts of the world, mainly focused on outcrops. But I also looked at the modern seafloor on 9 different research cruises during my PhD back in the very early 1990s and right through until the end of the 1990s. So we've used data on cruises I've been on, as co-chief scientist on some of them, on Russian and British and Italian research vessels looking at the seafloor, looking at deep water systems to try to understand them from a modern perspective. So I'll show you some data from some of those cruises.
But in terms of just where I've been since, since I left the University of Aberdeen in 2005, I ran this company Deep Marine for 13 or 14 years. I also became an honorary professor at both the University of Aberdeen and also the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen and in the Hangzhou Institute (Petro China Institute of Petroleum Geology in Eastern China) and other places like that.
I've run quite a lot of classes. Many of them are week-long classes which are based in hotels and things like that around the world through companies such as Petroskills and Nautilus.
And I've run an awful lot of field classes. So I run deep-water turbidite field classes for acid teams or mixed groups of people in the Spanish Pyrenees, in Southeast Spain, in Ireland, in South East France, and in the maritime French Alps, all over Southern and Eastern Turkey, in Western and Southern California, and also in Southern Chile where we've done a lot of field work. So I've done lots of those types of field classes with different groups of people. I've had more than 2,000 oil company professionals through my Petroskills classes alone, and I've run over 100 field classes in total since 1994. I also worked as a consultant during that time (during the deep marine time), focused on West Africa primarily, but also working in the North Sea, working in North Africa, working in parts of offshore South America, and places like that.
And then I joined Tullow Oil in 2016 and became the principal geologist, working and based in Accra in Ghana, where I was the main geoscientist working on the Jubilee and TEN fields working in development and production, drilling wells and all that sort of good stuff. Then I moved back to exploration with Tullow in London for 6 years, and then I exited in 2025 and restarted my company again, Deep Marine.
So I come from a mixture. I was an exploration manager in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana at one stage during that. So I've worked in exploration, development, production, appraisal, within operating oil companies as well as being a consultant working more widely.

03. Talk Structure and Objectives

So today I'm gonna take some of that experience to bring it to bear in this seminar-style presentation and share that with you, what I understand of these things. So the presentation today is broken up into 10 or 11 different segments which you can break up if you wish on the SAGA Wisdom platform. But I'll start off with a review of confined slope channel complexes, which is what I call them, slope channel complexes you might call them. I'll go through all the different aspects of deep water slope channel and complexes to try and help you understand the range of the reservoir properties, trap configuration, all those types of things to help you in exploration when you're looking at prospect evaluation, where you start off trying to define the prospect itself, what is the boundary, what is a container that these slope channel complexes occupy, what are the dimensions. And then start to go in through all these different characteristics to look at the rock property distribution, the connectivity, thevolumetrics, the risking, all these types of things in exploration. And in development and appraisal of oil fields, of course, looking at these types of beasts, slope channel complexes, you can then start to think about connecting injector and producer oil pairs within these features, and start to look at all aspects of development to maximize waterflood management or just production from different parts of the field. So the whole basis of this, is to allow people working both in exploration as well as in appraisal and development of these types of fields but framed within a geoscience context. So Point 2 there on the summary slide is looking at the container of themselves. So what is the bounding container? How do you define it on seismic? How do you delineate the whole reservoir envelope?
Then I'll move on to how the whole slope channel complex systems develop over time. So I'll start off with anything that happened before. Often, you find the slope channel complexes have precursive sand sheets and other styles of reservoir underneath or laterally equivalent to the main prospect which are often overlooked. So I'd like to take you through that.
And as we go through the slope channel complexes, I'll take you to the architecture of the fills and how they vary in nature from all these different examples that I've mentioned already. We start off with Basal Debrites, so one key aspect of the slope channel complex is where is the bottom and often people tend to put them a little bit too high. I always say put it lower, is usually how we define these things, and I'll talk through that.
Then we go into the main reservoir container itself. And I'd like to go through the channel complexes within the whole slope channel complex sets, and start to look at well log signatures and talk about variations in connectivity. These reservoirs are, after all, a family of reservoirs. So they encompass a very wide range in nature of net-to-gross, of connectivity, of reservoir properties and all those types of things, shale continuity. So there isn't a very narrow range of characteristics, but I'll show you from the data, seismic and other data, how you can try and focus in on which style of slope channel complex you're dealing with.
We'll move up through that. We can look at things like stacking patterns within, even on seismic. We can try to delineate the main reservoir bodies and you can tell a lot from their stacking. So understanding how they develop and grow is really quite key.
And in all of these slope channel complexes, as I'll show you, they're driven very much by external forces. So they're linked directly to the shelf in most cases, and then you tend to get very strong sequence stratigraphic signatures over these systems. So on Point 7, after you get the main reservoirs you often get these late-stage meandering skinny channels within the architecture which are very worth having a good look at in detail here.
Outside the slope channel complexes many of these systems are constructional. So they're levee confined, they're not purely erosional. And I'd like to look in more detail at these levees because these potentially have huge volumes of thin-bedded hydrocarbon pay within them. And they tend to be ignored because they're a different development prospect really. You look at them differently to the fill of the slope channel complex themselves.
Then I'll step back a bit in the closing sections. I'd like to go back through some of how these slope channel complexes form, what initiates them, how they develop over time, and just how they originate in the first place. And I'll show you some of the published examples I've published myself on how that happens. And I'll take you through some of the current models.
And finally, to try and help you to focus a bit more, what I find useful (rather than being didactic) is to try and win your favor by taking you into what you know already. So we'll look at what I call unified models for looking at the variations of these systems about the complex stratigraphic trap configurations or a combination of trap configurations for example. But it gives you more of a starting point to help you delineate the rock properties and connectivities of these systems.
So that's the summary, just 11 short sections which you can run through the whole lot of them in one go or you can take them in bite-sized morsels as you go through this platform.