Instructors: Dr. Peter A. Scholle, and Dr. Dana Ulmer-Scholle, New Mexico Tech & Scholle Petrographic

Synopsis

The Permian Basin, one of the largest petroleum provinces in North America, is still a very active site for petroleum exploration. This class is designed to look petrographically at the various facies, including (in various times and places) open shelf, sabkha, lagoon, backreef, reef, forereef and basinal environments. It also involves identifying organisms, lithologies, porosity types, and diagenetic fabrics.

Since diagenesis has profound effects on the porosity and permeability of carbonate reservoirs, we need to understand how diagenetic changes affect these deposits through time (syndepositional to burial, as well as late-stage uplift-related alteration). Such analysis provides valuable information on both the history of reservoir potential through time as well as the history of fluid flow through the units. Although many reservoirs produce mainly from primary or early-formed pores, there is a growing understanding that late-stage diagenesis can also form excellent productive reservoirs — thus we will look at examples of both.

Unlike most courses that consist of only lectures, this course provides participants with an opportunity to have hands-on experience using standard petrographic microscopes to better understand how diagenesis impacts carbonate reservoirs.

This class is for participants who have some fundamental knowledge of reservoir geology; in addition, some minimal petrographic experience would be useful but is not absolutely essential.

The Course

Integrating petrography into petrophysical or core studies of carbonate rocks provides unique and important information about their diagenetic history. The information garnered from petrographic analyses can be utilized to better understand reservoir trends, diagenetic effects that impact reservoir quality, and model fluid flow through these rocks. It is also essential in properly identifying and selecting material to be used for geochemical analysis. This course combines an overview lecture with hands-on petrographic observations of thin sections from a variety of cores and outcrop samples from the Permian Basin. Participants are also encouraged to bring their own thin section samples from that region to the class and play “stump-the-chump and chumpette” with the instructors. The morning will be lecture based and the afternoon will be spent doing hands-on petrography

The Instructors

Dana S. Ulmer-Scholle

Dana developed an early love for geology while growing up on the classic Upper Ordovician outcrops around Cincinnati, Ohio. She received a B.S. degree in 1981 from the University of Cincinnati. Dana completed a M.S. degree (1983) at Southern Methodist University working on the Mississippian Arroyo Peñasco Group of New Mexico. After a stint working for ARCO Exploration Co., she returned to SMU for a Ph.D. (1992). Her dissertation research concen- trated on evaporite-related diagenesis in upper Paleozoic carbonate rocks from New Mexico, Wyoming and Greenland.

Dana has worked, or consulted, for a number of companies including Amoco Oil and Gas Co., ARCO Exploration, ARCO International, Mobil Research, and Maersk Oil and Gas. Currently, she is the co-owner of Scholle Petrographic, LLC, a petrographic consulting company. Dana is also an Associate Research Professor at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. She teaches carbonate-related courses including petrography and depositional/diagenetic models. Her research interests include CO2 sequestration in carbonate and siliciclastic systems, carbonate sedimentology and diagenesis, petrography, low-temperature isotope and trace element geochemistry, fluid inclusion analysis and fluid flow histories in sedimentary rocks. While at New Mexico Tech, she has also been involved in environmental investigations that include heavy-metals bioremediation and fate-and-trans- port of heavy minerals in the environment. She is the author, coauthor or editor on numerous papers, reports, books and CD-ROMs with AAPG Memoir 77 receiving the Robert H. Dott, Sr., Memorial Award (2005).

Peter A. Scholle

Peter received his B.S. in geology from Yale University in 1965. After a year at the University of Munich in Germany, and another year at the University of Texas at Austin, he received a Ph.D. in geology from Princeton University in 1970. His dissertation work, on deep-water carbonate turbidites in the Italian Apennines, was supervised by Al Fischer.

Peter’s professional employment included state and federal government, the petroleum industry, and academia. He worked for five years for various oil com- panies (Cities Service, Gulf and Chevron) and consulted for other oil companies for many years. Nine years were spent with the U. S. Geological Survey in Reston (VA) and Denver (CO), including three years as chief of the Oil and Gas Branch. He taught at the University of Texas at Dallas for three years and was Albritton Professor of Geology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas from 1985 to 1999. From 1999-2011, he was the New Mexico State Geologist and director of the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources. He is now the co-owner of Scholle Petrographic, LLC.

Peter has devoted much of his time to carbonate research and writing. His major interests are in deepwater carbon- ates (especially chalks) as well as the diagenesis and petroleum potential of Permian rocks in many areas of the world. He has worked in nearly 30 countries and has written, coauthored, or edited nine books, about 200 papers and abstracts, 23 CD-ROMs, and a number of other computer or audio-visual products. Peter has been a member of AAPG and SEPM since 1976-77. He was an AAPG Distinguished Lecturer (1975-76) and received the AAPG President’s award twice, the Sproule Memorial Award, the AAPG Certificate of Merit and the AGI Ian Campbell Medal for Superlative Service to the Geosciences (2013). He served as president and special publications editor of SEPM and is an honorary member of that society. He was also president of AGI and AASG (the Association of American State Geologists).