Arjun G. Yodh is the James M. Skinner Professor of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Physics & Astronomy is his home department, and he has a secondary appointment in the Department of Radiation Oncology in the Medical School. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and his B.Sc. from Cornell University. He joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1988, following a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at AT&T Bell laboratories. His current interests span fundamental and applied questions in condensed matter physics, medical and biophysics, and the optical sciences. He has devised microscopic methods to measure tiny forces on macromolecules in suspension, and in studies of solution entropy, he has identified novel ways to control the self-assembly of macromolecules. His group has made important contributions to an interdisciplinary field of optical research aiming to understand and use diffuse light to probe highly scattering materials, from complex fluids to human tissues. Lastly, he has pioneered the use of nonlinear optics to probe level structure, charge dynamics, and defects at the interface between crystalline solids. His lab group has several areas of ongoing research including: complex fluids, laser spectroscopy and micromanipulation, biomedical optics, and nonlinear optics. He has received numerous honors. Professor Yodh was a national Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator (1990-95), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (1991-94), and an Office of Naval Research Navy Young Investigator (1991-94). He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society. He has served as a Sigma Xi National Lecturer in Science, and is currently on the Editorial Board of Physical Review E. Most recently, he held the William Smith Term professorship of Physics & Astronomy at PENN.

Warren Hamilton is internationally recognized for his innovative work with the tectonic and petrologic evolution of the continents, from top to bottom, and of the subduction process. His recent work emphasizes the early Earth, and mantle evolution and kinematics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Penrose medalist of the Geological Society of America.

The data set for this study is a 4.25 square mile 3D-3C seismic survey that was acquired over the Eva South Morrow Sand Unit, Texas County, Oklahoma. Ensign Oil and Gas of Denver is the operator of the field and the owner of the seismic data. Analysis of azimuthally variant common conversion point (CCP) gathers indicates that there is a strong variation of reflection travel time and data quality with respect to source-receiver azimuth. These anisotropic effects required special treatment during processing. Rotating the converted wave data to its principle azimuths of N50W and N40E, as well as restricting the data to limited azimuth volumes greatly improved the integrity of the converted wave data.

Seismic modeling shows that the Morrow sandstones at the Eva South field are indistinguishable with P-waves, but can be easily detected with converted waves. The presence of reservoir sandstone produces a notable converted wave amplitude increase.

The converted wave data vividly delineate the extents of the reservoir sandstone at the Eva South field. An amplitude extraction of the converted wave morrow sandstone reflection shows that a very strong amplitude increase coincides with the reservoir sandstone distribution. Numerous P-wave interpretation techniques (P-wave amplitude, AVO, coherency, etc.) were unable to equal this success of the converted wave data.

The results of this study demonstrate that converted wave seismic data can indeed detect thin Morrow sandstones that are invisible to P-waves. The converted wave data at the Eva South Field have aided in the delineation of the reservoir and have provided new drilling locations for additional reservoir exploration and development. This technology has the potential to make a dramatic impact on future Morrow sandstone exploration and development.

Travis graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 19999 with a degree in Exploration Geophysics. His industry experience includes two summers with Western Geophysical, two summers with Marathon Oil company, and one summer with Anadarko Petroleum. His specific area of interest is converted waves and AVO for lithology and fluid identification. Travis will graduate from Colorado School of Mines this spring with a MS degree in Geophysics. Travis' advisor is Tom Davis.

To access the intrinsic absorption, however, we must be able to separate it from other frequency-dependent effects, mainly scattering. In a horizontally layered medium, the trouble is caused by short-period multiples which interfere with absorption estimation in two ways: first, by "coloring" the elastic response of the medium; second, by redistributing the wavefield in space, so that a large portion of the energy emerging at a given time doesn't come from the depth sampled by the corresponding ballistic arrival. The latter effect makes it difficult to map absorption variations but wouldn't be a problem in a medium with spatially-invariant absorption properties. The focus of my talk will be on the fore-mentioned "coloring" effect which, if not taken into account, would bias the absorption estimate even in the simplest case of a spatially-invariant Q.

Albena earned a MS degree in physics with a geophysics minor from Sofia University, Bulgaria. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate with the Center for Wave Phenomena and expects to complete her degree in 2002. Albena's main research interests include inversion theory, particularly uncertainty analysis, and signal processing. She has spent the past several summers working with the Research and Development Department at Western Geophysical (now WesternGeco), where she became interested in scattering and absorption estimation. Albena's advisor is John A. Scales.

The presentation will focus primarily on the development of the interpretation techniques and their applications, including a discussion of environments in which they will not work. It will also very briefly review the physics of the nuclear wireline measurements.

Susan Herron holds a BS degree in geology from Tufts University and MA and Ph.D. degrees in geological sciences from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She spent seven years in Buffalo where she did research on the Greenland Ice Sheet. She joined Schlumberger in 1984 and has been active in research on the applications of nuclear spectroscopy logs for formation evaluation and geological characterization. She is currently Program manager of Formation Evaluation Nuclear and Cased Hole in the Reservoir Formation Evaluation Department at Schlumberger-Doll Research.

Louis Chabot is a M.Sc. student in geophysics at the University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Louis is also a student member of the Consortium for Research in Elastic Wave Exploration Seismology (CREWES) at the University of Calgary. He received his M.Eng. in mining and control system engineering (1996) from McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, and his B.Eng. in mining engineering (1984) also from McGill University. Soon after obtaining his B.Eng., he joined Schlumberger of Canada Ltd. to work as a field engineer at the Grande-Prairie, Alberta, open hole district office. Before starting his M.Sc. program, and joining CREWES in 2000, Louis was the engineer manager of the instrumentation division of the Quebec Ministry of the Environment, Province of Quebec.

He is the present recipient of the T. Davey Einarsson scholarship from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists foundation and recipient of a grant from the Society of Professional Well Log Analysts Foundation. He is also a member of the Order of Engineers of Quebec, the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Canadian Society of Exploration Geophysicists, the Canadian Well-Logging Society, and the Society of Professional Well Long Analysts. He is a professional engineer and the past president of the Montreal Region Chapter of the Order of Engineers of Quebec (1991-92). His current research interests span applied questions in borehole geophysics, such as single-well seismic imaging, petrophysics, and well-logging.

The 2001 NFB Everest Expedition was sponsored by the National Federation of the Blind and organized and led by Pasquale Scaturro, a veteran of numerous Himalayan expeditions including three climbs of Everest. The goal of the expedition was to prove that there are no limitations to what a blind climber, or for that matter any blind person, can accomplish. The expedition wanted to make a bold statement about the capabilities of blind people, their right to assume first-class citizenship, and the fact that, given the proper training and opportunity, blind people can do just about anything. The slide presentation will cover the entire expedition from the team's arrival in Katmandu, Nepal, to the final summit push.

Pasquale Scaturro received degrees in Geology and Geophysics from Northern Arizona University in 1980. He worked as Senior Geophysicist with Amoco Production Company in Denver until 1984 and Chief Geophysicist with McMoRan Oil and Gas until 1986. In 1986 he co-founded Seismic Specialists, Inc. In 1995 after spending several years exploring for oil and gas in Africa he founded Tricon Geophysics. Pasquale has been actively involved in international mountaineering and rafting expeditions since 1986. He has been to the Himalayas many times and has climbed Mount Everest three times, reaching the Summit (29,028 feet) as climbing leader of the 1998 Everest environmental Expedition. He is currently vice-president of Exploration Specialists in Denver and most recently expedition leader of the 2001 NFB Everest Expedition.

I will show results and offer personal answers to these questions.

Rodney Calvert studied physics at Oxford and geophysics at Imperial College, London, after which he started with Shell as a seismic processor. He then had a series of management positions in Shell Operating Companies: five years as Manager of Group Geophysics, and five years of reservoir characterization. He is currently learning seismology all over again via 4D.

Rosemary Knight received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. In Geological Sciences from Queen's University and a Ph.D. (1985) in Geophysics from Stanford University. From 1987 until 2000 she was a professor at the University of British Columbia, and since 2000 has been a professor in the Geophysics Department at Stanford University. Research interests include laboratory and theoretical studies of the electrical and elastic properties of fluid-saturated rocks, the use of various geophysical methods (radar, seismic, nuclear magnetic resonance) for near-surface groundwater and environmental applications.

Geoff Dorn
SEG 2002 Distinguished Lecture
Thursday, March 21, 2002
Reception - 4:00 p.m. • Lecture - 4:30 • Metals Hall • Green Center

David Smeulders
Delft University of Technology
Thursday, March 22, 2002
Reception - 4:00 p.m. • Lecture - 4:30 • Metals Hall • Green Center

The high-frequency behavior of the fluid velocity patterns for smooth and corrugated pore channels is studied. The classical permeability approach by Johnson, Koplik and Dashen for smooth geometries is obtained in different manners, thus clarifying existing differences with Sheng and Zhou and Avellaneda and Torquato treatments. For wedge-shaped pore geometries, the classical permeability approach must be modified by a non-analytical extension proposed by Achdou and Avellaneda. The dependency of this non-analytical extension on the apex angle of the wedge was derived. Precise numerical computations for various apex angles in two-dimensional channels confirmed this theoretical dependency, which is different from the original Achdou and Avellaneda predictions. Moreover, it was found that the singularities introduced by the wedges do not alter the parameters of the classical theory by Johnson and coworkers.

David Smeulders holds an M.Sc. in Aeronautical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Physics. He has been working in the fields of acoustics and porous media since 1988, currently as an associate professor in petrophysics at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. He is (co)author of some 60 scientific publications. His affiliations are SPE and DPS (Dutch Petrophysical Society).

This talk is a case study that covers most aspects of static modeling for reservoir simulation, including the preparation of the structural framework and populating it with reservoir properties. It will highlight the realities and pitfalls of some data and how the simulation outcome is influenced by this data.

Lesley Evans graduated from Rice University with a BA in geology and geophysics, and completed her M.Sc. from the University of Colorado in geology studying ice sheet/climate interactions in Baffin Bay, Canada. She joined Amoco Production Company in 1989 as an operations geologist working tight gas reservoirs in SW Wyoming. She spent one year at Amoco's Petrophysical Training Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she worked on Jonah Lance reservoirs for pay prediction and completions effectiveness. She will be publishing this work in an upcoming AAPG treatise on fluvial reservoirs. Lesley joined Schlumberger's reservoir modeling team in 1998 to broaden her experience and to apply her petrophysical skills. Her first 3 years with Schlumberger were spent modeling complex carbonate reservoirs---particularly the natural fractures and vugs utilizing image logs. For the last year she has been back to working on tight gas sandstone reservoir characterization in the Rockies.

Kate McKinley
Geophysics M.Sc. Candidate
Friday, April 5, 2002 • 4:00 p.m. • Metals Hall • Green Center

Leo Brown
Geophysics M.Sc. Candidate
Friday, April 5, 2002 • Metals Hall, Green Center • 4:00 p.m.

Leo Brown is headed to Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, as an exploration geophysicist. It's been a strange road to get there, involving degrees in geology and civil engineering and work experience in earthquake seismology, geotechnical engineering, engineering geophysics, and nondestructive testing.

P-wave impedance interpretation has an advantage over amplitude interpretation because impedance is related to the layer properties. Preliminary results from evaluation of P-wave impedance difference between time-lapse data are encouraging. Injection and production data within the field support the correlation of impedance difference and CO2 injection within the Marly reservoir. Further work is required to estimate the uncertainty related to the repeatability error in time-lapse seismic data, the thickness of the reservoir, the magnitude of the changes in the reservoir properties and the error in the inversion itself.

Ida Herawati received a B.Sc. degree in geophysics from Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia, in 1998. From 1998-2000, she worked for Unocal Indonesia Co. as a training geophysicist. During summer 2001, she worked with UNOCAL at Sugarland, Texas as an intern student and joined the exploration group.

Passive seismic monitoring has been used for reservoir monitoring and fracture detection, however carbon dioxide injection monitoring is a new application of the technique. The temporal and spatial relationship between the induced seismicity and the injection processes can be examined. There is also an issue with scaling relationships between small magnitude events and larger earthquakes, in terms of source process and energy release.

I am; analyzing two microseismic datasets from fractured carbonate reservoirs one monitoring production only, the other monitoring a CO2 injection program. The first dataset from Clinton County, Kentucky, was recorded under ideal conditions and provides an excellent opportunity to develop a methodology for analysis of induced earthquakes. Once this methodology is developed, it can be applied to datasets where recording conditions and data quality are not ideal, which is the case for most passively monitored active reservoirs. The methodology developed includes phase identification, earthquake location, spectral analysis, multiplet analysis and relocation of the events. Themicroearthquakes are being studied in depth in order to gain a better understanding of stress changes in the reservoir, source processes of the microseisms and scaling relationships between microseisms and large earthquakes.

Barbra Maher is currently wrapping up the research phase of her Ph.D. while teaching College Physics at Red Rocks Community College. Prior to CSM, Barbra received an MS at University of Arizona in earthquake seismology and a B.Sc. in Physics from Austin Peay State University in Tennessee. She has two wonderful red headed daughters to keep her on her toes.

Evaluation of the district's deposition ore controls, through a compilation of historic mining data and accompanying geologic data, continues to facilitate the successful targeting and delineation of additional significant near-surface resource opportunities and high-grade, deeper target opportunities. The implementation and development of computer hardware and software applications, newly applied drill techniques, and computer-modeling procedures have been significant contributors to this success. In particular, the application of a district-wide comprehensive, multi-element model, which includes geological, structural, geophysical and geochemical models, has significantly improved exploration drill targeting.

Development of an in-house voice recognition drill sample logging software has allowed for the efficient electronic capture of drill data. This in turn has led to expanded data capture capabilities, more efficient data collection and timely interpretation in conjunction with commercial 3D modeling software and reduced transcription error rates. The use of a relational database has allowed for quicker data compilation, data evaluation, 3D modeling and result-driven program adjustments while allowing for full utilization of data across the mining operation.

Aggressive exploration programs, initiated in January of 1998, have subsequently led to a net increase in near surface ore reserves of 88 MM ore tons containing 2.4 MM gold ounces, (190% increase) as of December 2000. With the successful identification of these new reserves, a major expansion in production capacity was approved and is ongoing, which will allow the Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mining Company's annual production rates to reach approximately 400,000 gold ounces per year by 2003.