Chapter 1 - Course Introduction

01-01 - Meet the Instructor (21 min.) Sample Lesson Quiz: 01-01 - Meet the Instructor

Chapter 2 - History and Principles of Geology

02-01 - Introduction to the Geosciences (9 min.)
02-02a - History & Principles of Geology - Part 1 (12 min.)
02-02b - History & Principles of Geology - Part 2 (24 min.)
02-02c - History & Principles of Geology - Part 3 (11 min.)
02-03a - Geologic Time & Time Scale - Part 1 (25 min.)
02-03b - Geologic Time & Time Scale - Part 2 (30 min.)
02-04a - Stratigraphy (10 min.)
02-04b - Stratigraphic Correlation (18 min.) Quiz: 02-04b - Stratigraphic Correlation

Chapter 3 - Earths Geology, Plate Tectonics and Basins

03-01 - Structure of the Earth, Rocks, Rock Cycle (21 min.)
03-02 - Plate Tectonics (19 min.)
03-03 - Plate Boundaries (13 min.)
03-04 - Sedimentary Basins - Extensional (18 min.)
03-05 - Sedimentary Basins - Compressional (28 min.)
03-06 - Paleogeology (28 min.) Quiz: 03-06 - Paleogeology

Chapter 4 - Sedimentary Rocks and Selected Environments of Deposition

04-01 – Sedimentary Rock Types - Clastics (24 min.)
04-02 - Sedimentary Rock Types - Carbonates (25 min.)
04-03 - Sedimentary Rock Types – Coal and Evaporites (32 min.)
04-04 - Sedimentary Environment of Deposition – Fluvial (28 min.)
04-05 - Sedimentary Environment of Deposition – Shoreface (28 min.)
04-06 - Sedimentary Environment of Deposition – Deepwater (33 min.)
04-07 - Sedimentary Environment of Deposition – Carbonates (21 min.) Quiz: 04-07 - Sedimentary Environment of Deposition – Carbonates

Chapter 5 - Elements of a Hydrocarbon System

05-01 - Hydrocarbon Systems – Source, Migration and Trap (35 min.)
05-02 - Hydrocarbon Systems - Seal and Timing (21 min.)
05-03a - Hydrocarbon Systems - Reservoir – Conventional – Clastics - Part 1 (16 min.)
05-03b - Hydrocarbon Systems - Reservoir – Conventional – Clastics - Part 2 (25 min.)
05-04 - Hydrocarbon Systems - Reservoir – Conventional – Carbonates (29 min.)
05-05 - Hydrocarbon Systems - Reservoir – Unconventional (32 min.) Quiz: 05-05 - Hydrocarbon Systems - Reservoir – Unconventional

Chapter 6 - Geoscience Datasets

06-01a - Geologic Datasets – Logs and Petrophysics Part 1 (13 min.)
06-01b - Geologic Datasets – Logs and Petrophysics Part 2 (28 min.)
06-02a - Geologic Datasets – Core - Part 1 (10 min.)
06-02b - Geologic Datasets – Core - Part 2 (30 min.)
06-03 - Geologic Datasets – Seismic (36 min.) Quiz: 06-03 - Geologic Datasets – Seismic

Chapter 7 - Geoscience Interpretation

07-01 - Geologic Maps and Cross Sections (32 min.)
07-02 - Subsurface Uncertainty (31 min.)
07-03 - Geomodeling (33 min.) Quiz: 07-03 - Geomodeling

Chapter 8 - Geoscience applied to Exploration

08-01 - Exploration Skillset and Definitions (27 min.)
08-02 - Petroleum Systems in Exploration (22 min.)
08-03 - Risking and Volumetrics (13 min.)
08-04 - Lookback Reviews (26 min.) Quiz: 08-04 - Lookback Reviews

Chapter 9 - Geoscience applied to Field Development

09-01 - Development Skillset and Definitions (19 min.)
09-02 - Reservoir Characterization (29 min.)
09-03 - Geologic Operations and Geosteering (33 min.) Quiz: 09-03 - Geologic Operations and Geosteering

Chapter 10 - Geoscience applied to Field Production

10-01 - Production Geology Skillset (23 min.)
10-02 - Production Monitoring (24 min.)
10-03 - Optimization and Infills (34 min.) Quiz: 10-03 - Optimization and Infills

Chapter 11 - Oil and Gas Fields of the World – Case Studies

11-01 - Conventional – Clastic - Cardium (21 min.)
11-02 - Conventional – Clastic – Mannville Heavy Oil (25 min.)
11-03 - Conventional – Clastic – Guyana (25 min.)
11-04 - Unconventional – Clastic – Piceance (33 min.)
11-05 - Conventional – Carbonate – Leduc (27 min.)
11-06 - Conventional – Carbonate – Tengiz (20 min.)
11-07 - Unconventional – Bakken (35 min.)
11-08 - Unconventional – Montney (33 min.)
11-09 - Unconventional – Permian (34 min.) Quiz: 11-09 - Unconventional – Permian

Chapter 12 - Geology of Emerging Energy Sources

12-01 - CO₂ Sequestration (45 min.)
12-02 - Helium and Hydrogen (32 min.)
12-03 - Geothermal (34 min.) Quiz: 12-03 - Geothermal

Chapter 13 - Course Summary

13-01 - Wrap-Up (11 min.) Quiz: 13-01 - Wrap-Up

Geology for Engineers / Chapter 1 - Course Introduction

Lesson 01-01 - Meet the Instructor

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Transcript

01. Lesson 1.01: Meet the Instructor 02. Course Description 03. Instructor Background 04. Teaching Approach 05. Course Content 06. Example References 07. Learning goals 08. Course Outline 09. Instructor Contact Information

01. Lesson 1.01: Meet the Instructor

Good morning everyone. Thanks for joining me for this course, called Geology for Engineers. My name is Michael Webb. I'm a professional geologist working in Calgary, Alberta. I've got some information on myself coming up that'll give you an idea of my background. And for now I just wanna introduce the course topics. I'll introduce myself and we'll go through the outline of the course.

02. Course Description

So welcome to everyone. This course is entitled Geology for Engineers, but it could be called Geology for Non-Geologists. So whether you're a professional engineer or you may be in management or you could be a professional in finance, operations, land, environment/EHS, or geomatics/GIS, really I hope you'll get some value out of this course that helps you in your daily work. And I do want to emphasize in this course just practical knowledge that is needed, for the most part, to improve communication within and across an integrated team. So I don't expect this course to turn anyone into a geologist, but I really hope it does help improve communication with the geologist that you know and love and work with down the hall. And in case you're wondering, there's no prerequisite for this course, so no previous knowledge of geology is necessary at all.

03. Instructor Background

So just a few words about myself so that you understand where I'm coming from, maybe a little bit about my background. So I do have a bachelor's and master's from the University of Alberta that's in Edmonton, about 3 hours north of where I am now here in Calgary. I did have the chance to go to Wyoming for my PhD work and I really enjoyed my time there. And during my time there, I got to travel extensively around the Rocky Mountain basins. Great experience. Oh, and I had my first summer job at that time. That was with Mobil Oil,, and it was deep water, deep water 3D seismic interpretation, which is actually a little bit outside my comfort zone. But during this course, we will talk about seismic interpretation and we will talk about deep water deposits. So I guess I can lean on some of my experience from way back then.
So I had my first job with Imperial Oil here in Calgary, which is part of the ExxonMobil world. I've worked extensively in oil sands during that time, and in southern Alberta which is mostly natural gas and light oil plays in a sort of typical Rocky Mountain basin. I eventually moved to Petro Canada and that's where I really started to gain more experience with heavy oil. But during that time I also did some exploration geology in, again, Rocky Mountain Basins of Wyoming, Montana, also in theWilliston Basin in North Dakota. I had a chance to work at Suncor Energy when Suncor and Petro-Canada merged, and I became a geoscience manager at that time. I worked as a geoscience manager with a small team. I think there was only 5 or 6 of us. And a good time to work with people and get some experience with people leadership. But then after about 3 years, I had a chance really to work sort of a dream job, and it was fantastic. I had this geoscience advisor job with Suncor. I did things like work with our geoscientists and engineers on training, so doing courses like this, but I also did technical peer reviews where I had a chance to dive into whatever the teams were working on and really try to work with the teams to ask good questions and encourage additional work and really try to make technical products better. And I also had a few special projects and worked things like technical standards, which may not sound like the most exciting thing in the world. But if you've got a bunch of geologists across a big company that are working in many different groups, then having some technical standards on how do we best do this certain workflow, then I think those standards do help a big company, and they help transfer knowledge from one small group where they're doing things really well and you bring it to the next group.
Right, so the courses I taught during that time are courses kind of like this one. So Geology for Engineers and Non-Geologists, I've taught that course for probably 10 years. However, during that time it was almost always heavy oil focused. So I would be teaching courses that are specifically talking about thermal projects in northern Alberta where the SAGD technology is used. But linked with that, I would teach afluvial course, a shore face course, so those are different clastic sedimentarydepositional environments. We're going to talk about that during this course. I taught petroleum systems and an integrated reservoir management course that involved subsurface uncertainty; that's a great course, we ran it in the field. And so that's a theme for most of my courses, is really trying to get into the field or the core lab with people so that people can see the rocks, whether it's in skinny core that's been recovered from the wells or going out to see an outcrop where you can really get a sense of the geology of whatever reservoir analog we're looking at.
After leaving Suncor a few years ago (I think it's been about 2 years now), now I'm consulting and part of that consulting work is doing training courses. And then I also do project work for various companies here in Calgary. OK, that's enough about me, but I just did want to describe that though so you know a little bit about my background. And then when you see some of the material, you'll see that some of the material is maybe steered a little towards things that are in my background.

04. Teaching Approach

So a few words about teaching approach. Generally I try to be a little bit informal. Hopefully that comes across as I'm not reading notes all the time. I might fumble around a little bit for the right word, but hopefully that comes across a little bit more naturally to you. I will speak from my experience and I'll try to highlight what my experience brings to this course. Where I might know a little bit more, you might see some of the slides already steering towards the topics that I'm more familiar with. And then I wanna be really honest with everyone and say, well, I know a bit about this other topic. It's not anything I've worked extensively, but here's a few slides that describe the general topic.
So my experience includes lots of... here on this slide I use the term 'soft rock' which is essentially sedimentary rock. Petroleum is my background, also paleontology. And when we talk about petroleum geology, then it's the reservoir that I focused the most on in my career. So diving into the sandstone reservoirs, the sedimentology and stratigraphy of those reservoirs has been my strength and that's where I've spent most of my time. And that fits with my PhD, which I didn't mention, but when I was in Wyoming I studied fluvial systems and paleontology. So fluvial systems are ancient river deposits. So that's where I'm coming from.
Also in the style, the last bullet point there is communicate the value of geoscience. So I'm a little bit of a booster for geoscience, I see the value, I want to make sure that people understand the value. Even some resource plays nowadays, the term "engineering play" might be used, and it's as if the geoscience doesn't matter. I certainly want to communicate during this course that that kind of thinking is really not going to be helpful to maximize shareholder value. So whatever company you work with, you want to drill the best wells, and if you don't take geoscience into account, you're going to be not spending the company's money in the most wise manner. So we'll talk about that along the way.
Now the first chapters of this course I've got a few sections that cover basic geological concepts and theory. We'll talk about some really big-scale things like structure of the earth and platetectonics. But then we'll start getting into the datasets and the interpretation that oil and gas professionals use on a daily basis. When we get into later chapters of this course we're going to talk about specific case studies, specific examples of oil and gas fields around the world, all kinds of different reservoir types in different conditions. I also want to communicate the kinds of datasets that are most valuable to geoscientists as they work in different teams. So as an example, I've talked about on the slide I mentioned, exploration, development and production. So those in my mind are 3 different types of skill sets that geologists are going to use when working on those types of teams. So that sort of thing we'll dive into a little bit. We'll pull out some detailed examples of why certain skills are important in different teams. So certainly when you look at geoscientists, we're definitely not all the same. Everyone's got their own skill areas and their own strengths.
OK, and one thing at the end of this slide is, of course this is an online course. Lectures are available online and can be, but don't have to be studied in sequence. So of course you can jump ahead to any chapter or lesson and then come back to the start.
Oh, I've got a few animated bullet points here. So references are at the end of every chapter. Now references are selected for the most part to be the most accessible. So there might be a better cutting-edge paper, but it might be a little bit more obscure and most people may not have access to it. I'm trying to balance accessible, easy to find references versus those that are harder to get to. But references will be a part of this course. Every figure should have a reference for it.
Quizzes will be provided at the end of every major chapter section.
And the last bullet point here is, again, this is an online course, lecture only. I think the optimal teaching method is to include some trips to the core lab to maybe see examples of reservoir or source rocks from different fields. Or we might go to the outcrops to see those things, but of course we're not to do that during this course. But most of my other courses do have that kind of focus. I am based in Calgary, Alberta, and I do like to have this hands-on experience as part of the course or any course I teach. So yeah, I'll just say contact me if you're interested in that kind of experience.

05. Course Content

Now, course content. This isn't the list of chapters, but here's some major things we're gonna cover in this course. I said we'll have introduction to the geosciences and geologic concepts. We'll talk about sedimentary rocks, sedimentary basins, and what are environments of deposition and why do they matter. We'll talk about elements of a petroleum system; all the elements that have to come together to create an oil and gas field. We'll look at subsurface datasets, the common datasets that are collected by geoscience teams. We'll talk about geoscience interpretation products. We'll talk about what's data and what's interpretation. As I mentioned we'll look at oil and gas life cycles, like we'll go from exploration to development to production. And I'll include case studies of these major oil and gas reservoirs around the world. That will include conventional/unconventional examples, onshore/offshore; we'll try to get as many diverse examples as we can. And then the last thing is to talk about the general geology of a few of the emergingenergy projects. So that could include the geologic search, the exploration for hydrogen and helium; it could include geothermal projects and how the skills of a geologist are applied in those types of projects; and carbon sequestration as well or CO₂ disposal, we'll talk about that. And I want to, along the way, of course talk about the integration between the geologist and the geophysicist and the engineering teams. So I'll try to add some of those examples and flavor as we go.

06. Example References

So at the end of every chapter I'll have a list of references that might look something like this. So you can see there's different professional societies here, like the top reference is the AAPG Wiki website. So they've got some good material there. The SEPM has great material, SEG. Yeah, there's so many of these publicly accessible websites that have good geoscience information and I will use some of that material in this course. There's also an online textbook by Earle, that's the second reference here. It's online, it's an open publication. So that's something I'll be using a little bit, especially in the early chapters. I won't use it much once we get past the first few chapters. Right, and then, yeah, I guess I'll stop talking, but at the end of every chapter, we'll have references like this.

07. Learning goals

OK, just a few more learning goals, which might be... Whoops, let's see, let's get through the first few of these. Maybe I won't read all these. I kind of went through a few already. But these are the kinds of material that we're going to go through. I just tried to list a few of these. Let's see... I think, yeah, I've got 14 learning goals here, so you can check out some of these goals. I hope some of these goals align with what you're looking for from this course. For example, #9, gain knowledge of key geologic components of a prospective exploration area that relates to the hydrocarbon system. #13 is something I'll try to talk about a bit, which is understand how geology controls reservoir performance. The type of reservoir it is matters, and we're going to talk about that, and of course linking that with recovery method. And then #14 at the end there, again, I hope as a learning goal that everyone that takes this course will enjoy some improved communication within their team of subsurface professionals.

08. Course Outline

Here's the chapter list for this course. So I've got it broken up into 12 chapters. Again, the earlier chapters on basics and history and principles of geology. We'll talk about very broad things like geology of the earth, platetectonics, what a basin is. But once we get to Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, we'll be in the meat of things. Really, here's what the geologist down the hall from you might be looking at, or what they might spend their day doing. And then that theme carries on through Chapters 8, 9, 10. And then Chapter 11 is where we'll try to really supply a bunch of diverse examples from different oil fields around the world. Again, that'll include as much variety as we can, conventional/unconventional, onshore/offshore, carbonate/clastics. And then that last chapter on some of these geology of emerging energy sources.

09. Instructor Contact Information

So this is the last slide I have on the introduction. It's just my contact information. Again, I'm based in Calgary, Alberta. You can send me an email. Or if you're taking this course online right now, then you can contact me through the SAGA Wisdom platform. But you can also email me directly and/or look me up on LinkedIn.
OK, so that's the end of this first chapter. And then as we dive into Chapter 2, we'll start to look at the basic geologic concepts and the history of the development of those.
Earle, S. Physical Geology–2nd Edition. Victoria, BC: BC campus. 2019.Panchuk, K. 2020. Laboratory Manual for Earth Science. Kelowna, B.C.; Bccampus. Ebooks.