This course is designed to develop skills in characterising carbonate rocks and identifying their depositional setting. The course also offers insights into the environmental, biological, physical, chemical and climatic controls on the carbonate factory, which provide greater understanding and prediction of the geometry and lateral heterogeneity of carbonate reservoirs in the subsurface. Facies analysis and sequence stratigraphy methods and applications will be covered, providing all the tools needed for reconstructing the sedimentological carbonate architecture at the field scale.

The workshop is organised into two sessions:

Part A: The carbonate system – “Carbonates are born not made”

• The mineralogy of carbonates
• The composition of carbonate rocks: skeletal vs non-skeletal allochems
• Classification of carbonate rocks
• The controls on carbonate production
• The carbonate factory – the impact of carbonate producers on the carbonate accumulation geometry
• The types of the carbonate accumulations
• Applied carbonate facies analysis
• Typical carbonate facies observed in core and thin-sections
• The key to identifying carbonate depositional environments

Part B: Sequence stratigraphy applied to carbonate reservoirs

• Introduction to the basic concepts of sequence stratigraphy
• Carbonate record and sea level
• Method to establish a sequence stratigraphic framework
• Prediction of the sedimentological heterogeneity and interpretation of the sedimentological reservoir architecture

Note: each section will be accompanied by example case studies and exercises.