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Registration Opens March 1 - to take part in the short courses offered here, you must be registered by Thursday, April 29!

Please note that you must be registered as a full Convention delegate in order to register for any of the field trips or short courses listed here.

This course will provide participants with an overview of the most important geomechanical aspects of  caprock integrity, reservoir containment, reservoir capacity, and well injectivity for carbon sequestration and CO­­₂ EOR.  A special emphasis will be placed on geological settings and reservoirs typical of Western Canada which are currently active or proposed pilot sites. The following topics will be presented:

• Introduction: Overview of carbon sequestration and CO₂ EOR, and how they are affected by geomechanical factors.
• Fundamentals of geomechanics: Rock mechanical and acoustic properties, fractures and faults, in-situ stresses, formation (pore) pressures.
• Geomechanical response to fluid injection: Poro-elastic and thermo-elastic responses of the injection zone and of surrounding rocks, effects of reservoir depletion prior to injection, saturation-velocity relationships.
• Geomechanical processes affecting CO₂ containment: fault re-activation, induced shear fracturing, induced tensile (hydraulic) fracturing, borehole stability and wellbore integrity.
• Geomechanical monitoring techniques: injection-induced microseismicity, ground and subsurface deformations, saturation-dependent seismic response.
• Case histories: Examples will be used to illustrate the principles taught in the course, to illustrate geomechanical site characterization needs, and numerical geomechanical modelling tools.

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Pat McLellan, M.Sc., P.Eng.

Pat McLellan is currently the principal consultant and president of McLellan Energy Advisors Inc. which provides consulting, research and training services to the energy industry. He was the founder and previously president of Advanced Geotechnology Inc., a petroleum geomechanics specialty firm that was acquired by Weatherford International in 2006. He is currently engaged as a consultant on several Canadian and international carbon capture and storage projects, CO₂ EOR projects, and other unconventional resource development projects. He received a B.Sc.(Eng.) in Geological Engineering from Queen's University in 1979 and M.Sc. in Civil Engineering (Geotechnical) in 1983 from the University of Alberta. He was previously employed in technical and supervisory positions in drilling, production and reservoir engineering groups at Petro-Canada and Shell Canada. He is a member of CSPG, CWLS, CGS, CHOA, CADE, SPE, AAPG and APEGGA. He has conducted or managed over 500 technical consulting studies; presented or published over 150 technical papers; and has given more than 80 short courses on geomechanics related topics in Canada and abroad. He was an SPE Distinguished Lecturer in 2003 and a recipient of the Outstanding Service Award from the Petroleum Society of Canada in 2007.

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Chris Hawkes, Ph.D., P.Geol.

Chris Hawkes obtained his Ph.D. in Geology from the University of New Brunswick in 1996, where he also obtained his B.Sc. in Geology-Physics in 1990. Dr. Hawkes is currently an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Geological Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan (U of S). Prior to joining the U of S in December, 2002, he had worked for six years as a geoscientist with Advanced Geotechnology, a Calgary-based petroleum engineering and geoscience consulting and software development firm.

Dr. Hawkes specializes in petroleum geomechanics; specific areas of interest include caprock integrity, CO₂ geological storage and EOR, borehole stability, laboratory investigation of rock mechanical and petrophysical properties, and mathematical modelling of coupled deformation – fluid flow phenomena in rock. He is a member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, the Canadian Geotechnical Society, APEGS and APEGGA.