Time: 11:30 am Virtual Social Icebreaker, Noon Speaker Presentation

Speakers: Dr. Stephen Sonnenberg, Colorado School of Mines 

Title: Codell Carrier-Bed Play, Denver Basin

Abstract: Carrier bed plays are an emerging type of unconventional oil play  in which reservoirs are generally of low quality because they are characterized by : 1) thinly bedded  heterolithic strata; 2) significant compaction and/or diagenesis; and 3) burrowing that has mixed sandstones and mudstone lithologies. In this type of play, the carrier beds are pervasively hydrocarbon saturated and can be areally extensive (> 50 mi2 or 130 km2). These low-quality reservoirs generally do not meet traditional petrophysical cutoffs and because of their high clay contents can have low resistivity, low contrast pays.  The reservoirs may be composed of clastics or carbonates or both.

Carrier bed plays are being developed with horizontal drilling and multistage hydraulic fracturing. Traditional vertical drilling yields marginal to uneconomic wells that can…