Have you benefited from EGI’s training courses? One of your major benefits as an EGI Corporate Associate is one week of instructional services provided by leading experts. In a time of limited training budgets, this is an effective, efficient option to provide top-tier training for your professionals at a minimal cost. For Field Courses, the only cost to member company participants is for actual expenses such as food, lodging, and travel. Short Courses may be taught at EGI’s offices in Salt Lake City or at your location, depending upon training requirements. Professional Development Units— awarded through the University of Utah, or professional development hours awarded through EGI are also available.
For more information about Short Courses or Field Courses, please contact us. We are happy to work with our CA members to aid in making the most of your EGI Membership.
Short Courses
Short courses taught by EGI’s experts offer your company an efficient, effective means to enhancing your productivity and elevating your professionals’ skills and technical expertise. Short courses (and field courses) can be used to fulfill in-country technical training obligations at a very low cost.
Concepts of Basin and Petroleum Systems Modeling (Short Course and Exercise)
This two-day course will introduce major aspects of Basin and Petroleum Systems Modeling in exploration. The course includes an overview of sedimentary basins and their classification scheme as well as of the petroleum system classification approach. Additionally, the course introduces participants to the most prominent geodynamic, physical, and geochemical processes acting on sedimentary basins through geologic time. Chapter summaries and exercises will help to understand and apply the theoretical aspects in modeling sedimentary basins for petroleum exploration purposes. A final project (exercise) using 1D IES/PetroMod will then further consolidate the acquired knowledge and skills to guide learners step by step through data requirements and preparation, model building, and simulation as well as results, analysis, and evaluation.
Geologic Characterization and Production Properties of Marine, Transitional and Lacustrine Shales in China
This is an integrated course covering geology, geophysics, geochemistry, geomechanics, drilling, reservoir engineering, and production engineering. It begins with an introduction to shale geology source rock characteristics, and follows with shale reservoir characterization, sweet spot prediction, and production characteristics. The course focuses on and compares shales deposited in the U.S. and China in marine, transitional, and lacustrine settings spanning in age from Pre-Cambrian to Quaternary. This course is taught by EGI’s China Program Coordinator.
Techniques in Play Fairway Analysis
This three-day course, suitable for geologists, exploration managers, and others involved in the exploration process, will review key tools and techniques used at each stage of the exploration process from Gross Depositional Environment (GDE) mapping, to building play cartoons and tectonographic diagrams, through constructing a fully integrated play fairway analysis applying the industry standard approach. The course includes two days exploration of the practical application of techniques and tools, through a 2-D seismic and well-based exploration exercise to work through a real-world example of regional basin evaluation leading to acreage and a subsequent drilling campaign. This course is taught by EGI’s Chair in Petroleum Geoscience at Imperial College London.
Play Fairway Analysis for Unconventional Petroleum Systems
This three-day course focuses on exploration, delineation, and risk assessment of the unconventional systems commonly termed “shale plays”— often a misnomer used to describe petroleum systems characterized by short distance migration and tight reservoirs that require advanced drilling and completion techniques to produce economic volumes of petroleum. The course will cover regional and basin scale evaluation of source, seal, trap, and reservoir quality in these plays, using industry standard techniques modified for the unique characteristics of the unconventional petroleum system. This course is taught by EGI’s Manager of Petroleum Systems & Geochemistry.
Petroleum Geochemistry and Basin Evaluation
This three-day course is an introduction to petroleum geochemistry concepts and applications for basin-scale evaluations. The course is designed for petroleum geologists with little exposure to geochemistry, geochemists with experience in conventional, but not unconventional, petroleum systems, and geochemists and geologists new to basin modeling and regional exploration. The course begins with a review of source rock description using qualitative and quantitative methods. The main focus is basin-scale evaluation and students will learn to calibrate basin models, increase model precision, and integrate oil and gas data (i.e., biomarkers, isotopes). The class will conclude with an interactive working session to evaluate host company data collaboratively. This course is taught by EGI’s Manager of Petroleum Systems & Geochemistry.
Shale Gas Resource Development
This two-day course provides a concise summary of the varying facets of shale gas development from resource identification and assessment, through production analysis, completion, stimulation technology, and environmental concerns. This course will emphasize describing and understanding the features of shale gas reservoirs that distinguish them from conventional gas reservoirs. This multi-disciplinary approach requires participants to think beyond their own specialties and apply lessons learned from conventional resource development while recognizing the need to develop new paradigms where needed. The course is presented as 1 ½-day theory with a half-day of discussion and further development.
Introduction to Geomechanics in Low Mobility Plays
This four-day course covers historical background and impact of stimulation decisions, along with Key Formation Properties of Low Mobility Plays, including storage, permeability, and stimulation requirements; Geomechanical Properties including stress, strain, strength, deformation properties, laboratory measurements, logging analyses, and field interpretation; and an Introduction to Hydraulic Fracturing & Implications for Low Mobility Situations with attention to principles for single, planar fractures, multiple interacting fractures, fluid requirements (volumes, sensitivity, etc.), geologic considerations, natural fractures, stress contrast, post-peak behavior, and lithologic considerations. The course also examines near-wellbore considerations for completing these types of wells. Additional issues to be addressed include wellbore integrity, reduced volumes, non-aqueous fluids, and air quality.
Structural Geology Primer (Classroom)
This classroom course provides a comprehensive introduction to the principals and tools of structural geology commonly used in the exploration and development of hydrocarbon resources. The course is designed to provide familiarity with a range of related subjects rather than proficiency in any single type of analysis. Upon completion, participants should be able to recognize the characteristic structural styles that form hydrocarbon traps and identify which additional methods might be beneficial for reservoir characterization.
Field Courses
Little compares to seeing, walking amongst, and learning from the rocks and geological structures in the field. EGI is located in the heart of amazing, world-class geology and stratigraphy. EGI has developed a number of field-based courses that take full advantage of the unique laboratory outside our doors. These field courses have been popular with a variety Corporate Associate member companies as well as affiliated government and academic institutions worldwide. Over 200 professionals have attended these courses in the past two years.
Additional courses are being developed related to the morphology and evolution of the fundamental structural forms that create hydrocarbon traps using seismic data and outcrop analogs to illustrate extensional, contractional, inverted, and strike slip deformation styles. Structural techniques such as restoration, curvature analysis, and geomechanical modeling of subsurface stress for fracture prediction are also covered. Depending on areas of interest CA members should inquire about field courses in the Basin and Range in Southern Nevada, the Northern Rockies in Montana, the Paradox Basin in Utah, the Cretaceous Platform of central Texas, the Pedernal uplift in New Mexico, the Canadian Cordillera in Alberta, and the Spanish Pyrenees.
Carbonate Sedimentology & Sequence Stratigraphy
This four-day Short Course with a Field component is designed for geologists, engineers, and others who desire an on-the-ground examination of carbonate sedimentology and sequence stratigraphy. The course includes a refresher on sequence stratigraphy and carbonate depositional systems, followed by description and interpretation of core samples. The field portion of the course examines a variety of representative geologic formations and offers in-depth discussion of contemporary concepts. The course will conclude with a summation of stratigraphy and petroleum systems.
Depositional Systems of Rocky the Mountains
This five-day Field Course offers an opportunity to observe and understand the sedimentology and tectonic evolution of several depositional environments in the middle Rocky Mountains of the western United States. It consists of a three-day field course from Denver to Salt Lake City with an additional one-day core workshop at EGI’s Core Repository and half-day lecture at EGI offices in Salt Lake City. On the road, participants will observe distal carbonates and shales to proximal mountain-front clastics. This course is available in either an east to west or west to east direction, depending upon CA interests and needs.
Paradox Basin Carbonates
This course is a four-day training opportunity incorporating field examinations and a core workshop. The course locations are in Salt Lake City and the Paradox Basin in the Four Corners area.
Petroleum Engineering and Field Geology
This unique course is designed for two weeks and can be structured to accommodate the participants’ needs and availability. The course integrates outcrop geology with visits to a wide range of engineering facilities. Areas include Green River Basin, Uinta Basin, Book Cliffs and the Paradox Basin. Topics include clastics and carbonates, conventional and unconventional, drilling and production, gas compression, storage and transportation. Offered every May for our MS Petroleum Engineering students and is available for our CA members also.
Precambrian to Tertiary Shales, Utah and Wyoming
This is a three and one-half day course examining the Book Cliffs and Uinta Basin in Utah along with Green River Basin WY.
Rocky Mountain Shales and Stratigraphy
A four-day field course with core workshop, the course travels from Salt Lake City, UT to Denver, CO. This course is similar to “Depositional Systems of the Rocky Mountains” but with an emphasis on Shales.
Stratigraphy and Structure of the Colorado Plateau
This four-day Field Course with half-day Core Workshop offers an in-depth examination of stratigraphic core & outcrops in central & southern Utah. The Field Course begins with an overview of the principles of sequence stratigraphy, examining models of both siliciclastic and carbonate systems followed by a core workshop at the Utah Geological Survey Core Lab where participants will have the opportunity to study and recognize significant surfaces and parasequence-scale facies changes in cores of two significant formations.
Structural Geology Primer (Field)
This field trip compliments the 2-day Structural Geology Primer Classroom course by illustrating in outcrop many of the concepts discussed in the short course.
Located along the I-35 corridor south of Davis, Oklahoma, the Arbuckle Mountains contain excellent exposures of geologic structures at a wide range of scales. The Woodford and Caney Shales, as well as Oil Creek, Bromide and ‘big-four’ reservoirs are exposed. The Arbuckle Mountains consist of a meso-scale inversion structure reactivating the edge of the southern Oklahoma aulacogen and verging northward into a thin skin fold and thrust belt. Overprinting extensional fault patterns are well developed locally. At the outcrop scale, there are excellent examples of tectono-stratigraphy, folding and faulting process, hydrocarbon seeps, and analogs for fractured reservoirs.