All are welcome to an invited seminar by Dr. Roberto Suarez-Rivera, Scientific Director, W.D. VonGonten Laboratories, Inc., College Station, TX. The title is: “Geomechanics for Unconventional Rocks.” The seminar will be from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday February 25, 2015 in WEB 2250. There will be light refreshments afterwards. Abstract – Geomechanics for Unconventional Rocks Unconventional reservoirs are complex, heterogeneous, and exhibit great variability in well production over small distances. The difficulty in understanding a reservoir’s behavior and in predicting its performance has both baffled us and made us humble. Interesting opportunities exist here for developing new understanding and for significantly changing the way these reservoirs are evaluated and interpreted. Heterogeneous rocks with planes of weakness fail along their weak directions, and these weaknesses need to be understood to predict where and how failure will occur. In the oil and gas industry, the standard approach to characterize geomaterials has been to homogenize their behavior at some relevant scale (2 ft to several ft) and to ignore the finer scale details. For unconventional rocks, with layered heterogeneity at multiple scales, their behavior appears to be strongly controlled by these details. However, our standard measurements do not help us to identify these features. We need a new approach, new measurements, and new workflows that incorporate weak-planes and interface information in the decision making process, and in physical modeling. Great breakthroughs emerge once an adequate mental picture is developed to describe a problem. An opportunity exists here for creating a better mental picture; one that is consistent across multiple disciplines: mechanics, geology, geochemistry, petrophysics, and fluid flow. Biography: Dr. Roberto Suarez-Rivera is a Scientific Director at WD Von Gonten Laboratories in College Station, Texas, USA. He has a PhD degree in Rock Mechanics from the University of California, Berkeley, and over twenty-five years’ experience in the petroleum industry. He was previously a Schlumberger Scientific Advisor and Director of the Schlumberger Innovation Center in Salt Lake City, Utah USA, Vice President of TerraTek, Geosciences Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Rock Physics Scientist at IKU Petroleum Research in Norway. Dr. Suarez-Rivera has authored multiple reports and papers in mechanical property evaluations and analysis of geo-materials, and has several patents on technologies for enhancing tight shale production. He is a leader in understanding the effect of heterogeneity on well construction, well placement, and completion design.
