Anadarko Basin
About the basin
Much of the Anadarko Basin is located in West Oklahoma, with parts extending into west Kansas, Southeast Colorado, and into the Texas Panhandle. The basin itself was initiated by a failed rift in the Late Precambrian to Middle Cambrian, and is bounded to the south by the Wichita and Arbuckle Mountains.
The sedimentary rocks range from Cambrian to Permian in age, and approach almost 40,000 feet thick in the deepest part of the basin. In fact, the Anadarko Basin is host to some of the deepest exploration wells in the world, nearing ~26,000 feet deep.
With successful exploration since the early 20th century, The basin contains a host of both conventional and unconventional resources, with 46 giant oil fields and the Woodford Shale, the dominant hydrocarbon source rock. It is also a major producer of Helium, and the brine from the basin is the only commercial source of Iodine in the country.
Projects
Sequence stratigraphic reservoir model construction and initial Discrete Fracture Network Model for a major field in Anadarko Basin (2016)
This project involved incorporating a sequence stratigraphic interpretation of well tops across a field in the Anadarko Basin into a faulted 3D reservoir model. While sequence stratigraphic models tend to be far more accurate in characterizing and predicting rock properties based on geology than lithostrat models, they are considerably more difficult to produce due to how markers onlap, truncate, and correlate with each other. Once I successfully built the deterministic framework for the model, I performed geostatistical analysis and distributed the required rock properties, including facies with cutoffs provided by the petrophysicist, porosity, matrix permeability, water saturation, etc. The second phase of the project entailed building an initial Discrete Fracture Network Model using FMI interpretation results from 12 key wells, and correlating the calculated fracture intensities for three fracture sets with depth converted seismic attributes provided by the geophysicist and sampled into the geocellular model. I finally calculated a dual permeability model for the field to be used in simulation.