Time: 11:30 am Buffet, Noon Speaker Presentation

RSVP online by Friday, March 8th at noon on the FWGS website www.fwgs.org.

Cost: $27 with RSVP, $30 with no RSVP, student members eat free with RSVP (Student Members please directly email the FWGS Secretary to RSVP).

Reminder: FWGS is charged for all RSVP's, so if you RSVP and do not attend you will be contacted concerning payment.

Speaker: John A. Breyer

Abstract:

Carrier beds provide pathways for hydrocarbons to migrate from source rocks to reservoirs. Carrier beds may—but often don’t—have the same reservoir properties as the conventional reservoirs supplied by them. Indeed, the boundaries of many conventional fields are defined by changes in porosity, and, more often, permeability, associated with a change in facies between the carrier beds and the reservoir. The low permeability of some carrier beds does not preclude them from supplying conventional reservoirs, because generation rather than migration is the rate-limiting process at geological time scales. If sufficient porosity exists for economic volumes of hydrocarbons to be present, the low permeabilities that previously marked the economic limits of some fields need no longer preclude extension of the field downdip into surrounding strata. Horizontal drilling and multistage completions may allow low permeability carrier beds to become reservoirs.

The offshore Mancos Shale play associated with Bisti field in the San Juan basin produces from the muddy, bioturbated offshore facies that served as carrier beds for the conventional reservoir. The term halo play has been used for certain unconventional light oil plays surrounding Pembina field in Alberta, Canada. Excluding bypassed pay, these plays are in fact producing from muddier, bioturbated offshore facies that served as carrier beds for the conventional reservoirs updip. Plays similar to the offshore Mancos Shale play and the halo plays surrounding Pembina field may be associated with isolated linear sandstones in the Cretaceous up and down the Western Interior Seaway—and elsewhere. Calling attention to this similarity by identifying carrier beds as a separate play type will focus attention on such plays and perhaps lead to future discoveries.

Bio:

John A. Breyer retired from Marathon Oil Company in 2018 after 7 years as a Senior Technical Consultant working in unconventional resources. He has extensive experience in the Barnett, Eagle Ford, and Bakken plays, and also the northern Delaware and central Oklahoma resource basins. John joined Marathon in 2011 after teaching for thirty-three years at Texas Christian University where he won numerous teaching, research and service awards. On his retirement from TCU, he was named an Emeritus Professor of Geology. John received the GCAGS Outstanding Educator Award in 2005. Most of his former students are in the oil and gas industry. John has authored or co-authored more than seventy articles in international and national scientific journals. Based on his research contributions he was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of America in 1991. His presentations at national meetings have twice been recognized for excellence by his peers. John is an expert in the geology of shale resource systems. He edited and contributed to AAPG Memoir 97 Shale Reservoirs—Giant Resources for the 21st Century, which won the Robert H. Dott Sr. Memorial award from AAPG as the Association’s best technical publication in 2012. A second AAPG Memoir with the title: The Eagle Ford Shale—A Renaissance in U.S. Oil Production was published in 2016.

In October, 2013, John spent two weeks hiking in the Himalayas as a participant in the National Geographic Society trip, Bhutan: The Sacred Valley Trek. In 2014 he spent three weeks in Russia and a week in Japan. In 2015, much to his younger colleagues’ surprise, John survived a hike into the Mt. Everest base camp. In the past John has been to Scotland, England, France, Argentina and Chile to take in the scenery, and to Abu Dhabi, Poland, Norway and Germany on business. In 2016, John crossed the Andes on the Inca trail into Machu Picchu, hiked to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, and visited Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti. He has hiked along the Great Wall in China and ridden a camel and milked a yak in Mongolia.