FORT WORTH GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY

May 11, 2009 11:30 AM at the Petroleum Club 

 

Please join us for our next meeting May 11th at the Fort Worth Petroleum Club.

THIS WILL BE THE FINAL MEETING OF THE 2008-2009 YEAR!

Scholarship Presentaions and Election of Secretary

11:30 AM, May 11, 2009

39^th Floor

777 Main Street

Fort Worth, Texas 76102

 

To RSVP for the meeting; please send an email

with your name and the number attending to:

RSVP2FWGS@gmail.com

  

The May 11^th FWGS meeting will host both the FWGS Scholarship Recipient Presentations and the Election of FWGS 2009-2010 Secretary.  Unlike years past; FWGS has a slate of three candidates for the office.  As this is a five year commitment to the Society; it is important that each member voice their opinion by voting.  The ballots will be available at the meeting on Monday; and you must be present to vote.

 

 
The candidates for 2009-2010 Secretary are:

Amanda Jones

Amanda Jones received her M.S. in Geosciences from The University of Texas at Dallas in August 2008.  Since graduating Amanda has worked for BOPCO, L.P. (formerly Bass Enterprises) in Fort Worth since July 2008.  Amanda is a geologist on the Southeastern New Mexico Asset Team.  She has been a member of the FWGS since 2007 and is also a member of AAPG, AWG and GSA.  A lifelong Texan, Amanda and her husband recently moved to Fort Worth from the Dallas area. 

 

Ulysses S. “Trey” Hargrove, III, Ph.D.

Trey has 12 years of experience as a research geologist and has conducted field and shipboard studies in the US, Africa, Japan, & the Middle East. During his academic career, Trey received several grants and fellowships and authored numerous publications. He was Associate Professor of Earth Science at Collin County College, and in 2006 left academics to become a geologist with ADEXCO Production Company in Fort Worth, working operations and exploration in the Barnett Shale and Fayetteville Shale plays. In 2008, Trey left ADEXCO to help start Newark Energy in Fort Worth and continues to work unconventional shale gas in the Barnett Shale and Marcellus Shale plays. Trey holds a Ph.D. in Tectonics/Geochemistry from The University of Texas at Dallas and B.A. and M.S degrees in Geology from Texas Christian University. He has been a member of FWGS since 2006 and in 1997 was a recipient of the FWGS Graduate Student scholarship. He is also an active member of AAPG, GSA, and Fort Worth Wildcatters.

 

Roy L. Yates

Roy received his BS in Geology from Hardin Simmons University in Abilene in 1985, and his MS from Baylor University in 1992.  Roy is a geologist for Encore Acquisition Company here in Fort Worth (2006 to present), and is currently working Ark-La-Tx, primarily Haynesville, Cotton Valley and Travis Peak.  Roy is a native Texan from Abilene; and a member of: The American Association of Petroleum Geologists, AAPG (Member since 1982), The Abilene Geological Society (President 1995-96); (Secretary 1993-94), and The Fort Worth Geological Society Member (since 2007).  Roy maintains Professional Geologist Status with: AAPG Certified Professional Geologist #5796, Registered Professional Geologist (Texas) #6680, and Registered Professional Geologist (Wyoming) #798.

 

  
2009 Scholarship Recipient Presentations:

 

 
Alan Redd Gunnell

Baylor University, Waco, Texas

 

Biography and Research

 

Alan is a Utah native who has always had an interest in geology.  He attended Utah Valley University and Utah State University graduating with a BS in Geology.  He is currently attending Baylor University as a geophysics Masters’ Thesis student.  He is married and he and his wife have twin toddler boys. 

          Alan was an undergraduate teaching fellow at Utah State where he received the Peter T. Kolesar and the Clyde T. Hardy Memorial Scholarships.  His senior research was working to gather better Curie Point measurements using Monte Carlo approach, ultimately giving better constraints on the geotherm.  This past spring Alan presented a poster at the AAPG Student Expo in Norman, Oklahoma.  The poster focused on methane hydrate vents located in Mississippi Canyon Block 118.  He is currently a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) for the GEO 1401 Earthquakes and Natural Disasters course at Baylor University.

Current Masters’ thesis work involves using existing single channel seismic data and electrical resistivity data to determine the subsurface distribution of methane hydrates within Mississippi Canyon Block 118 (MC118), located in the Gulf of Mexico.  MC118 contains active methane vents in which methane hydrate has been observed outcropping on the seafloor.  The presence of hydrate within sediment pore spaces is expected to increase both the seismic velocity and electrically resistivity.  Hence, the two data sets are complimentary.  The single channel, deep-receiver-shallow-source seismic data were acquired by the Gulf of Mexico-Hydrate Research Consortium (GOM-HRC) and used to map specific areas of interest within MC118.  Throughout the MC118 site, the seismic data quality is excellent, except in the main area of interest, within and adjacent to the methane vents.  Near the vents, the seismic data are chaotic, likely as a result of the presence of free gas, hydrate, and biogenic carbonate blocks.  I use this characteristic to map the aerial extent of the main hydrate zone as a guide to planning the resistivity survey.  The dimensions of the hydrate zone, found within the center of MC118, is 0.4275 km² and trend north-west (NW) to south-east (SW) with the main vents located along the same trend.

In a second part of the study I am analyzing the high-quality seismic data in these zones to look for seismic attributes that correlate with the presence of hydrate.  The seismic data have been processed for this study by bandpass filtering from 125 Hz to 680 Hz to reduce strumming noise from the receiver cable.  After applying this filter, the data are subjected to trace attribute tests of coherency, phase, velocity, and frequency to locate zones of incoherency, potentially associated with the presence of hydrate within the sediment at variable levels of saturation. 

The final step for this research will be to analyze the electrical resistivity data we will gather in June.  This data along with the seismic data will allow for a better understanding of the migration pathways, areas of free gas, and the general locations of the methane hydrate beneath these hydrate vents. 

 

RESEARCH

Current--Resistivity methods either off shore looking at methane hydrate deposits using single channel seismic data to constrain a deep-sea resistivity survey to locate accumulations of hydrate in the subsurface.

Senior Research-- Looking to better constrain the geotherm using a Monte Carlo approach to obtain better Curie point measurements.

 

 

 

 

Turning Barriers into Baffles: Fluvial Migration Processes within a Belt and the

Potential for Amalgamation of Fluvial Deposits.

 

Neal Alexandrowicz

University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington Texas 96019

 

 

Given an understanding of the internal architecture, facies relationships, and processes at work within modern river belts, what would it take for fluvial sandstones to appear as amalgamated sheets in the rock record? With advancement in the knowledge of how the interior of belts really look, it is possible to address the issue of understanding how those belt deposits might be preserved in the rock record. Studies of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers have shown that abandoned channels are the most likely places for the accumulation of fine-grained material within the channel belt proper. While the Mississippi River represents a model for muddy fluvial systems, the abandoned channel fill seen in our study area contains a significant amount of rather gritty active channel fill. On average, only the upper 10 meters of an abandoned channel are composed of the very fine-grained muds representing truly passive fill. The abandoned channel facies, whether active or passive, constitute less than 25% of the total belt deposits, the remainder being point bar and channel bottom sands. If belt deposits are discretely preserved, fines within the belt can act as barriers to communication between porous units. If, however, the belt deposits are allowed to amalgamate during more gradual aggradation, younger belt systems could incise into the older deposits. This incision can erode away the muddy tops of older fluvial deposits and replace them with sands laid down by younger channels, thus creating amalgamated sandstone units.

 

Recent work on the Mississippi River has allowed us to relate dimensional characteristics of the modern river to the scour profile at the base of the belt. This scour profile is a key to determining how much of the fine grained material in the upper part of an abandoned channel might be preserved. Using this data, it is possible to determine the vertical shifts that would lead to either the preservation or the erosion of fine grained facies from fluvial deposits. Once connected by the scour surface, communication between stacked channel-belts depends on the reservoir quality. Our study shows that, even in muddy systems, the material into which a fluvial surface scours is likely to have sufficient quality to permit reservoir communication.

  

 

Stratigraphy of the Marble Falls Group (Pennsylvanian),

Jack, Wise, and Northern Palo Pinto Counties, Texas

Klinton Farrar

Department of Geology

Texas Christian University

 

The Fort Worth Basin, north-central Texas, existed as a foreland trough from the Late Mississippian through the Late Pennsylvanian.  The Bend arch to the west, the Red River arch to the north, the Muenster arch to the northeast, the Ouachita thrust to the east and the Llano uplift to the south define the limits of the basin.  These features were reactivated in the Late Paleozoic by the collision of the North American plate with the South American plate in the Ouachita orogeny.  The development of these features influenced the settings in which Mississippian and Pennsylvanian strata were deposited.  The Marble Falls Group (Pennsylvanian) in the Forth Worth basin consists of interfingering carbonate and clastic strata deposited during a fall in relative sea level.  Deposition of the Marble Falls spanned the Morrowan and Lower Atokan.  Carbonate deposition took place simultaneously with, and was influenced by, the deposition of clastic sediments.

 

In Wise County the Marble Falls is composed of two carbonate intervals separated by a medium bedded shale (~40-60’).  This shale has been mistaken for the underlying Barnett Shale (Mississippian) where the lower Marble Falls carbonate is thin leading to confusion over the placement of the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian boundary.  Operators often refer to this shale found within the Marble Falls as the “false Barnett.”  The sequence in Wise County passes downward from Marble Falls carbonate, to “false Barnett,” to upper Barnett, to Forestburg limestone to lower Barnett.  The contact between the Barnett and the “false Barnett” is taken to be the Mississippian-Pennsylvanian boundary.

 

To the west in central Jack County stratigraphic relationships have not been clearly resolved.  In one interpretation, the Forestburg thins and pinches out, and the Barnett is overlain by a thin Pennsylvanian carbonate.  Above the carbonate, in turn, are a shale unit (~50’), another carbonate unit (~30-80’) and a thick Pennsylvanian clastic section (~300-400’).  In another interpretation, the thin carbonate unit is the Forestburg limestone and the overlaying shale is the upper Barnett.  In this case the boundary between the Mississippian and the Pennsylvanian occurs between the upper Barnett and the Marble Falls clastics.  In the first case, the Mississippian-Pennsylvanian boundary is at the base of the lower limestone.  I plan to use high-resolution log correlation, petrographic data from core, and some seismic data to determine the stratigraphic relationships in this interval.

 

 

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The Bossier-Haynesville Shale

North Louisiana

Salt Basin:

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• Midland, Texas April 26-29, 2009
• Southwest Section Call for Papers

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The Barnett Shale Play
Phoenix of the Fort Worth Basin
A History

The Fort Worth and North Texas Geological Societies are proud to announce the publishing of Dan Steward's book on the history of Barnett Shale drilling in the Fort Worth Basin. The book will be available from the F.W.G.S. for $35 plus $5 shipping and handling. Click here for a link to the order form.  The books are on back-order; so please allow extra time for delivery.

Contact Frank Paniszczyn, Frank_Paniszczyn@xtoenergy.com for information.