BPSM Scientists and Graduate Students work on a variety of problems in basin and petroleum system modeling. These problems are organized here by research topic and by geographic area.
A research topic covers themes both broad and specific in scope that can be applied to many modeling scenarios in different geographic areas. Most of these research topics are placed in their sedimentary basin and petroleum system context in the geographic area section to determine their applicability to other settings.
A geographic area is a sedimentary basin or tectonic setting where a research topic is applied to a basin and petroleum system modeling case study.
Gas hydrates hold vast volumes of methane and affect a wide range of scientific interests including drilling hazards, potential future energy resource, global carbon cycling, geohazards, and climat
I determined the geochemically distinct oil families in the Middle Magdalena Valley, Colombia, based on the chemometric analysis of source-related biomarker and isotopic ratios.
The Sur Basin (informally called the Partington Basin) is an ~1800 km2, asymmetric, structural basin offshore of the southern part of the central California margin, bounded to the south by the Sa
Porcelanite and chert originate from marine diatoms as diatomite, which undergoes diagenetic conversion of amorphous opal (opal-A) to cristobalite and tridymite (opal-CT) and finally quartz.
Second-year Masters student Minh Tran works at the intersection of basin and petroleum system modeling and rock physics, under the guidance of BPSM Principal Scientist Tapan Mukerji.
The Middle to Upper Triassic Shublik Formation is one of the key source rocks for hydrocarbons in Arctic Alaska and the greater Prudhoe Bay field area, the largest field in the North America.
BPSM Scientists Ken Peters and Oliver Schenk, along with graduate student Danica Dralus, built a prototype module in commercially available petroleum system modeling software to determine the depth
The phase transitions from opal-A to opal-CT to quartz plays an important role in hydrocarbon trapping in regions with siliceous deposits, particularly where structural traps are absent.
Graduate student Tess Menotti is combining traditional basin and petroleum system modeling of the Salinas basin, California, described here, with a geochemical study of the area.
Linking a basin and petroleum system (BPSM) with seismic attributes has many potential applications. Calibrating basin models is crucial to building credible models that honor existing data.
Pore pressure prediction is important for both real-time drilling to optimize field safety conditions, and for paleo-modeling to provide a framework for development of the basin and petroleum syste
Three-dimensional (3D) basin modeling is often over-simplified in tectonically and structurally complex sedimentary basins, neglecting structures that are potentially critical to understanding hydr