Short Course

SC-01: Chemometric Tools to Establish Petroleum Systems, Predict Physical Properties, and De-Convolute Mixed Production

Sunday, 24 August | 8:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. | George R. Brown Convention Center

Sponsored by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)

This one-day course is for all geoscientists who want to extract hidden information from substantial amounts of chemical and physical data using multivariate statistical (chemometric) tools. The course emphasizes applications rather than the mathematics of various chemometric methods and will include a demo version of Pirouette 5.0 chemometric software. Case studies focus on the following topics of immediate interest to geoscientists:

• Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) and principal component analysis (PCA) of biomarker and stable isotope data for oil-oil and oil-source rock correlation to establish petroleum systems.
• Quantitative regression analysis of chromatographic peaks by alternate least squares (ALS) to de-convolute mixed oils derived from two or more sources. In exploration, ALS identifies mixed oils (e.g., pre-salt and post-salt oils in the Middle East and Southern Atlantic). In production, ALS allows allocation of mixtures originating from multiple reservoir zones.
• Prediction of physical properties by partial least squares (PLS) of data obtained by micro-analytical techniques. PLS allows investigators to predict API gravity, sulfur, and viscosity for reservoir zones where only small samples of cuttings from storage are available for analysis.

Co-Leaders

Guest Speakers

Course Leader(s)

Two prerequisites for every student considering this course are (1) desire to learn powerful methods to extract information from large datasets (“data mining”), and (2) complete mastery of partial differential equations. JUST KIDDING! There will be no math in this course (with limited exceptions). Chemometrics consists of a variety of statistical methods to extract information from complex multivariate data. The data can be from any field of science or engineering, such as geology, chemistry, biology, archaeology, environmental science, or planetary science. This course will emphasize examples of interpreting geologic datasets. If your future involves doing the science of geology, then you need to acquire the available chemometric tools to better understand your datasets.
Participants will learn through lectures and exercises how to visualize complex data, use exploratory data analysis to understand their data, and use qualitative and quantitative analysis for classification, property prediction, and production allocation.

Participants are asked to bring laptops, although it is not required.