Ross McCartney recently delivered a customised workshop for WintershallDea entitled ‘Are your formation water compositions reliable?’.  The workshop was presented on-line over five, weekly, ~2.5 hour sessions to a variety of petrophysicists, production chemists, production engineers and geologists from Norway, Germany, Russia, Mexico, Argentina, and the Middle East.  The convenient format enabled staff to attend all or parts of the workshop as they required, regardless of time zone.  

The first four sessions of the workshop covered:

• The factors controlling formation water compositions in sedimentary basins.
• Lower salinity formation waters – why they are important, their origins and occurrence, and their compositions.
• Variation of formation water compositions in an individual field – why they occur, the risk that they will occur, and how they can be identified.
• How to acquire good quality formation water compositions from well tests, formation tests, and core samples.
• Factors and processes that can cause your formation water sample composition to be different from that in the reservoir, and how to identify when this is likely to be the case.
• How to estimate the formation water composition when your formation water samples/analyses are compromised, how to validate the estimate, and the importance of recognising remaining uncertainties.

The topics were illustrated with many field examples, including several from WintershallDea fields.  In the final session, WintershallDea staff had the opportunity to present some relevant current field examples and describe the challenges associated with them.  This was a good opportunity for these to be discussed amongst the staff to consolidate their learning from the workshop, and to gain expert input and guidance on these cases from Ross McCartney.

The post-workshop survey showed the overall experience of the participants was very good (4.43 out of 5) and all participants said they would recommend the course to a fellow colleague.  Andreas Kansy (WintershallDea Chief Petrophysicst) said:

“We asked Ross to put on this workshop because of his expertise, experience, and knowledge in this area, and because we knew it would provide an important learning opportunity for our technical staff, regardless of experience.  The format worked well and meant that attendance was high despite work commitments.  The use of field case studies (many from our own fields) to consolidate the information provided in the presentations, was particularly beneficial.  The workshop met all our expectations, was well presented, and covered many aspects of formation waters that are not normally included in other oilfield educational resources”.

If this type of workshop would be of interest to you and your company, please message ross@oilfieldwaterservices.co.uk and he will be happy to discuss with you how the course can be tailored to suit your requirements.