What This Program Covers

Carbonate reservoirs hold about 60 percent of the world's remaining oil and gas, but they behave differently than sandstones. Porosity and permeability patterns often have little to do with original depositional fabric. Diagenesis can create excellent reservoirs in mud-dominated facies or destroy porosity in grainstones. Making accurate predictions requires understanding both the depositional system and the burial history.

This intensive program covers carbonate sedimentology, diagenesis, and reservoir characterization. You will learn to recognize depositional facies in core and outcrop, interpret the controls on original texture and composition, and predict how diagenetic processes modified the rock.

Core Skills You Will Develop

The program emphasizes core description and thin section analysis because this is where you actually see what controls flow. You will work with real core material from producing fields, describing textures, identifying diagenetic fabrics, and linking observations to porosity and permeability measurements.

We cover the major carbonate platform types: ramps, rimmed shelves, isolated platforms, and epeiric seas. Each has characteristic facies patterns and diagenetic pathways. Understanding these patterns helps you predict reservoir distribution away from well control.

Diagenesis gets detailed attention because it often dominates reservoir quality. You will learn to recognize cementation patterns, dissolution fabrics, dolomitization styles, and fracture systems. The program includes methods for predicting diagenetic trends using sequence stratigraphy, burial history, and fluid flow modeling.

Later sections focus on building 3D reservoir models. How do you populate a geocellular model when facies boundaries are gradational and diagenesis is patchy? What data should guide your interpolation between wells? These practical questions matter when you are trying to forecast production or plan development wells.