2008 28th Annual GCSSEPM Foundation Bob F. Perkins Research Conference
"Answering
the Challenges of Production
from Deep-water Reservoirs:
Analogues and Case Histories to aid a New Generation"
December 7–9, 2008, Houston, Texas
As the technology of floating drilling and production platforms advanced, the decade of the nineties saw the petroleum industry step out into ever deeper water in search of new of hydrocarbon fairways. The reservoir facies of these fairways were, inevitably, the sediments deposited by a variety of mass-flow deposits deriving largely from Tertiary delta systems transporting sediments into the passive margin basins formed by the breakup of Gondwanaland. The migration of the petroleum industry into deep water encouraged a concomitant surge in research in deep-water sedimentation, both in academia and the research labs of the major companies. This research, based in theoretical understanding of the mechanisms of mass flow, the intensive study of outcrop analogies, and some producing field studies, has been the mainstay of development and production geoscientists and engineers seeking analogs to constrain their geocellular models and predict as accurately as possible the future state of their reservoirs. The costs of developing fields in water depths now commonly upwards of 5,000 feet has increased the pressure on those geoscientists and their engineering colleagues to be as perceptive as possible in their predictions regarding how reservoirs will behave.
The aim of the 28th annual Bob F. Perkins Research Conference is to augment the available stock of deep-water reservoir analogues using a new generation of studies drawn largely from the producing fields and discoveries in those fairways that have been accessed in the last quarter of the 20th century, so as to come to the aid of the producing fields that are coming into their own during the first decade of the 21st century.