Events

On Monday, October 12, the Graduate Seminar will be held at 3:00 pm. The speaker is Tao Sun, PhD, Senior Principal Scientist at Chevron. Graduate students can find the Zoom link in their inboxes.

Title: Linking sedimentary processes, dynamics, and the creation of stratigraphic patterns through computation

Abstract: One of the most important application of stratigraphy is to enable predictions of rock properties of sedimentary deposits away from limited data points, e.g. one or a few wells. Sedimentary deposits are archives of the physical and chemical processes that operate on the surface of the Earth over multiple timescales. Many of these processes are highly non-linear and fluctuate in time and space to create complex sedimentary and stratigraphic patterns. Identification of the essential mechanisms for the emergence of these features at all scales and linking these processes to the stratigraphic patterns they form are the foundation for making predictions of the properties of preserved sedimentary systems, and predictions from limited data points, e.g. 1D well log/core data to rock properties in 3D volumes.

Computational stratigraphy is a new technology we developed in recent years. It has the physics based forward model at its core, and is augmented with the associated technologies and workflows to enable quantitative comparisons between model and field data, and quantitative analysis of the simulated stratigraphic model in full 4 dimensional space, with the 4th dimension being the time dimension. At its core, the forward model is based on the fundamental physics of fluid dynamics and sediment transport for both suspended and bedload materials, and can be setup with any physically feasible initial flow input and basin boundary conditions to simulate geologically realistic scenarios. The input and boundary conditions can also vary in time and space, to simulate changing geologic conditions often associated with the extrinsic controls of the depositional system. The model produces realistic depositional system’s geomorphology and their time evolution. The model also produces highly realistic and high resolution 3D stratigraphy for all siliciclastic environments, including fluvial, shallow marine, with tide and wave, and deep water. The simulation results are in good agreement with previously published data from outcrops, well logs, cores and are also compares favorably to many comparable seismic data sets.

Using computational stratigraphy, we were able to link flow and sediment transport processes to the emergence of geomorphic structures and to the formation of characteristic and predictable stratigraphic patterns in multiple scales. An integrated Computational Stratigraphy workflow analyzes available field data and applies geologic concepts to develop a range of forward model input scenarios. The resulting ensemble of digital analogs, spanning the range of plausible reservoir interval interpretations, are used to quantify the potential impact of reservoir characterization uncertainly ranges and are used in reservoir models to define uncertainty in reservoir production forecasts. Forecasts defined by analyzing an ensemble of digital analogs are better anchored in observed geologic interpretation uncertainty than those based on traditional reservoir modeling methods.

Bio: Tao Sun received a B.S. in Physics from Peking University- Beijing, China in 1990. He received a M.S. in Physics from the University of Oslo, Norway in 1994. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from the same university in 1998. His dissertations focused on advanced statistical characterization of landscape evolutions and drainage networks, and computer modeling of meandering and braided rivers. In 1995, Tao Sun was awarded the IBM Student Fellowship for Parallel Computing from IBM Norway, and worked in IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights in New York as a visiting scholar for three months. From 1998 to 2000, he is the recipient of the Norwegian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship. During that period of time, he worked with Prof. Gary Parker in the St. Anthony Falls Lab, University of Minnesota, on problems concerning cyclic steps, meandering rivers and evolutions of fan and fan-deltas. He moved to Tallahassee in 2000 and worked in the School of Computational Science and Information Technology in the Florida State University as a research associate. There his research interest has been mainly focused on using high performance computational models to understand the evolution of salt marshes and tidal channels, and the effect of vegetation on tidal channel geometries.

From 2002 and 2012, Tao Sun worked in ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company first as research specialist, senior research specialist, research associate, and late as senior technical advisor of Earth Modeling. Tao Sun joined Chevron as a Consultant Research Geologist and a R&D project manager in 2012. Currently, he is a Senior Consultant Research Geologist and is leading the research and development of technologies to enable 3D numerical prediction of reservoir architecture and performances by linking stratigraphy to fundamental physics processes and using high performance computing technology.

Archived Fall 2020 Seminars