CAS CONNECT 2013

6 klahoma State University’s part- nership with 11 oil companies will give new life to old oil fields behind the booms of yore. The companies, including Devon and Chesapeake Energy Corp., are working with OSU’s Boone Pickens School of Geology to better understand Mississippian midcon- tinent carbonates. The ancient seabeds of Oklahoma and Kansas limestone are believed to encase nearly 6 billion barrels of oil — just under what the United States consumes in a year. Those fields have been in business for more than 40 years, says Michael Grammer, the OSU professor leading the effort. More than 14,000 wells, drilled with the conventional vertical method, pumped out billions of barrels before the accessible stuff was tapped out. But energy companies now have new ways of getting previously non-recoverable oil and gas out of the ground with methods such as hydraulic fracturing, developed by engineers in West Texas, the Michigan Basin and else- where. With that in mind, the OSU group is looking at how the Mississippian reservoirs are built and what might be the best ways to get at what’s inside them. Energy Boom is a Boon for OSU Geology “Ours i s the f i rst project to rea l l y go out and tr y to understand what are the reser voi r t ypes, how they are di str ibuted, how you can f ind them and how you can produce them.” — Michael Grammer, OSU professor “Ours is the first project to really go out and try to understand what are the reservoir types, how they are distributed, how you can find them and how you can produce them,” says Grammer, who helped start the partnership after his hiring at OSU in July 2012. Oil companies, including one of the OSU program’s partners, SandRidge Energy, have jumped at the midcontinent plays. But the region is not without its challenges. It’s a complex play, Grammer says, with very different characteristics across its reservoirs, ranging from how easily liquid moves through its rock to its seismic properties. The companies will rely on Grammer and his colleagues Darwin Boardman, Jay Gregg, Priyank Jaiswal and Jim Puckette, for research and development. They’ll be using high- tech, three-dimensional modeling to show the companies the equivalent of a road map telling them where and how to drill. Normally, companies buy such informa- tion on the open market. And because the Mississippian is booming, those costs would be astronomical. With the consortium, the companies benefit from the research efforts of OSU’s faculty and graduate students while providing new scientific data that will be published by OSU scientists. It’s a win-win for all involved, Grammer says.