Professor David I.M. Macdonald
December 10, 2013
13.00 – 14.30
Beijing – 1 Auditorium, China cluster (Skolkovo School of Management)
SEMINAR ABSTRACT:
The North Sakhalin Basin in the Russian Far East is one of the world’s most prolific hydrocarbon provinces, with more than 6 Bboe discovered to date. For the past 25 million years the basin has been supplied with sediment by the Amur, which has deposited a thick deltaic sequence throughout the basin. Much of this basin is now exposed onshore in the northern part of Sakhalin. These sediments are being actively exhumed and recycled into offshore areas of the basin because of deformation along the Sakhalin-Hokkaido Shear Zone.
The majority of the sand in the Amur River and its former delta comes from an area 2000 km upstream, shown by uniformity of sediment composition in the lower river. Sediment composition of the modern river is identical to the most recent deltaic deposits in the basin, with a progressive decrease in the proportion of unstable grains with increasing depth and stratigraphic age. Stable mineral ratios and U-Pb ages show that there are only minor variations in Amur sediment composition from the Early Miocene to the present day. This has major implications for risking reservoir quality in oil exploration in the region.
There are intensively weathered heavy mineral zones with low Apatite-Tourmaline index (ATi) and GZi are evident in Miocene deposits encountered in offshore wells. These values may be used as a basis for correlation and could lead to development of a high-resolution stratigraphy leading to the possibility of carrying out real-time heavy mineral analysis during drilling.
This talk addresses the way that fundamental science interacts with the economic imperatives of the oil industry to the benefit of pure research and industrial innovation.
SPEAKER INTRODUCTION:
Professor David Macdonald holds the Established Chair in Petroleum Geology at the University of Aberdeen. He graduated from the University of Glasgow with a BSc in geology with First Class Honours, and began work for the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), as a contract geologist on South Georgia (Antarctica). At the same time, he was a member of Darwin College (University of Cambridge), where he obtained his PhD for sedimentological work on the Cumberland Bay Formation. After a postdoctoral fellowship in Keele University, he joined BP and worked as a sedimentologist in their International Division, undertaking field work in Sabah and Irian Jaya.
He rejoined BAS as Senior Sedimentologist and became leader of the Basin Dynamics Project, working mainly in Alexander Island, but also taking part in joint work with the US National Science Foundation in the Transantarctic Mountains. He was awarded a Polar Medal in l987.
In 1993 he became Director of the Cambridge Arctic Shelf Programme (an independent geological research group in the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge). Their staff of 30 scientists and support staff conducted industrially sponsored geological research in frontier exploration areas: Arctic, Russian Far East, China, and the South Atlantic.
Since 1999, he has been Professor of Petroleum Geology at the University of Aberdeen and was Head of School of Geosiences 2005-2010. His current research is on sand provenance, reservoir quality and tectonic controls on sedimentation (mainly based on Sakhalin and California). He has published more than 60 research papers and popular science articles, supervised 25 PhD students, and received about 1000 citations.
He is married, with two children, and is a Fellow of both the Geological Society (Chartered Geologist) and the Royal Geographical Society.
