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The following are the minutes from the latest Industry Biostratigraphy
Coordinators (IBC) Meeting. If you have questions or comments
regarding these minutes or the issues contained herein please contact
Sheila Barnett (barnetsc@bp.com), R.J. white (rjwite@amoco.com) or any
of the other IBC members.
IBC Meeting Notes: August 20th 1997
In attendance:
Sheila Barnette, Jim Newell, Jason Lundquist (summer intern) - BPX,
Dick White - Amoco,
Garry Jones - Spirit Energy,
Gregg Blake - Unocal,
Brian O'Neill - Shell,
Denise Butler - Pennzoil,
Thomas Demchuk - Conoco,
Ron Morin - Mobil,
Hilary Olson - UTIG,
Jed Damuth - UT-Arlington.
. Garry Jones gave an update on the Computational Stratigraphy
Alliance meeting held in Salt Lake City in July. A short synopsis:
Eight companies are now supporting the Alliance. Several
universities, including Stanford, Univ. of Colorado, Rutgers, and
possibly LSU, will be using the software and suggesting improvements.
Training and coordination of research will be done by Hilary Olson at
UTIG. The IPS software development will continue to be done at the
University of Utah under the direction of Tony Gary. They are looking
at 3 years of development to have a marketable product ready. The
intent is to link with existing vendors and vendor systems on a
unified platform. The cost is $25,000/yr thru' this year as a charter
member.
. We will issue an updated participant address list at the next
meeting. The next meeting will be held at Unocal in Sugar Land on
Wednesday, October 8.
. Also discussed, was the desire to get participation from additional
companies in our meetings. Ideas included trying to get at least 2
meetings/year held in New Orleans for those who would like to attend,
but cannot get to Houston for the meetings. Mobil and Shell agreed to
host meetings in New Orleans. Additionally, we might try and make
personal contacts among the larger independents to see if they would
like to send a representative.
. Dick White gave an update/recap of the Operating Styles Matrix and
the issues we identified from the information in this matrix. These
issues will be addressed at the next meeting as we concentrate on our
goals for 1998. Some of these issues include: succession-planning,
or where is the next generation of biostrats and biostrat coordinators
to come from, and how to we facilitate ensuring that there is a next
generation; how do we "encourage" university departments to stress
stratigraphy/biostratigraphy courses in their geoscience curriculum;
data generation and management issues and "common data formats" to
facilitate data exchange; monitoring changes in EPA/OSHA rules in
handling of sample material; research and development issues in paleo
(better called "technical advances" to eliminate the negative
connotation of the word "research"); image/perception of paleontology
vs. biostratigraphy; how to we advance the discipline; etal.
. Bob Fleisher sent a report on the Applied Paleo Chapter for the AAPG
Handbook. The text has gone from the editor to the "production
people" at AAPG. The editors lost some of the illustrations and had
also lost some of the "permission to publish" letters for the
illustrations taken from published papers. That info is being
regenerated at this time. A target publishing date was not available
at the time of our meeting.
. Hilary Olson and Jed Damuth gave a presentation on their proposal
for a research consortium project entitled "Sea-Level Influences on
Gulf of Mexico Intraslope Basin Sediment Processes". In brief, the
project would utilize piston cores, very high-resolution seismic data,
side-scan sonar data, and high-resolution swath bathymetry data to
address the influences of sea-level changes on sedimentary processes
in intraslope basins. The project would integrate seismic
interpretation, sedimentology, and biostratigraphy. It is envisioned
as a 2 year study with a set of specific deliverables: 1] a report
and map at end of year one on the characterization of sandy facies and
depositional processes in the GOM intraslope basins (i.e. turbidity
currents, mass-transport, bottom currents), to define sand-body
geometry and architecture (fans, channel-levee systems, lobes, slumps,
debris flows, etc.) in order to better understand reservoir
geometries; 2] stratigraphic correlation of cores between GOM
intraslope basins using biostratigraphy, carbonate stratigraphy, and
C14 dating, to define the relationship between sedimentation processes
and sea-level fluctuations and to test the validity of sequence
stratigraphic models for deep-water sedimentation (report end year 2);
3] characterization of the benthic foraminiferal nature of
specific depositional facies along the slope and within intraslope
basins in order to develop a predictive model for industry based on
these faunas (report end year 2). Meetings with sponsoring companies
will be held during both years. Olson and Damuth will be the
principal investigators; in addition, they plan to have 2-3
undergraduate and/or graduate students and 1 post-doc working on the
project. They will collaborate with Dave Twichell and Hans Nelson of
the USGS. The deliverables will not be student theses or
dissertations. Cost of the project will be $180,000 each year for a
total of $360,000. If 8-10 companies agree to sponsor, the total cost
per company would be in the $36,000-$45,000 range for the 2-year
project. (that figure could vary depending on the final number of
companies who elect to participate) Anticipated start would be
January 1998.
*As stated above, the next IBC meeting will be hosted by Unocal in
Sugar Land on Wednesday, October 8th.
Partial index: