Rock physics and steam

Over the last few weeks, I have been revisiting and reminiscing over some past work, and found this poster I made for the 2007 SEG Development & Production Forum on the geophysics of heavy oil. A few months ago, the organizers of the workshop made a book out of many great articles that followed. Posters, however, often get printed only once, but that doesn't mean they need only be viewed once.

The poster illustrates the majority of my MSc thesis on the rock physics of steam injection in Canadian oil sands. You might be interested in this if you are interested in small scale seismic monitoring experiments, volume visualization, and novel seismic attributes for SAGD projects. For all you geocomputing enthusiasts, you'll recognize that all the figures were made with MathWorks MATLAB (something I hope to blog about later). It was a fun project, because it merged disparate data types, rock physics, finite-difference modeling, time-lapse seismic, and production engineering. There are a ton of subsurface problems that still need to be solved in oil sands, many opportunities to work across disciplines, and challenge the limits of our geoscience creativity. 

Here's the full reference: Bianco, E & D Schmitt (2007). High resolution modeling and monitoring of the SAGD process at the Athabasca tar sands: Underground Test Facility (UTF), 2007 SEG D&P Forum, Edmonton, Canada. If you prefer, you can grab these slides which I gave as an oral presentation on the same material, or flip to chapter 6 in the book.