Microseismic Monitoring and Geomechanical Modelling of CO2 - bris

Acknowledgments
There are many things for which an aspiring Ph.D student should be grateful, including: assistance
with technical and scientific issues; the acquisition of interesting datasets; seemingly endless supplies
of money to attend conferences; top-quality BBQs; and most importantly the encouragement and
motivation to keep going throughout the three (and a bit) years required. I have been very fortunate
that in Mike Kendall I have had a supervisor who has provided all of the above throughout my time
at Bristol, and to him goes my first and largest thank you.
I am also extremely grateful to Doug Angus, with whom I worked closely on the geomechanical
and rock physics aspects of this project. Not only did he teach me the joys of FORTRAN 77, but he
has done much to help turn some of my ideas and models into workable codes, and spent many hours
sourcing ultrasonic data with which to calibrate my rock physics models.
Most of the funding during my Ph.D came from UKERC, and I am grateful to them for providing
this money. Towards the end of this project I received some extra funding from the Petroleum
Technology Research Center of Canada.
Much of the geomechanical work in this thesis was done under the umbrella of the IPEGG project,
and I wish to thank the project leader, Quentin Fisher, as well as all those who have worked on
IPEGG, especially Jose Segura and Sergei Skachkov at Leeds University, and Tony Crook and Martin
Dutko at Rockfield Software, Swansea. I also thank the project sponsors: BP, Statoil, ENI and BG
for funding the IPEGG research
I would like to thank Pinnacle Technologies Ltd for providing the hydraulic fracturing data used
in Chapter 4. In particular I would like to thank Shawn Maxwell for setting this opportunity up, and
Natalia Verkhovtseva for showing me around Pinnacle’s in-house software. Shawn also did some of
the initial work in locating and describing the microseismic data from Weyburn. Also from Canada,
I am grateful to Don White of the Canadian Geological Survey for providing the microseismic data
from the Weyburn project, and for acting as my liaison with those working at Weyburn. I would also
like to thank all the reviewers who provided feedback on my journal articles: many of their comments
have fed back into this thesis.
I would like to thank Andrew Curtis, from Edinburgh University, and Fiona Whitaker from Bristol,
for acting as my examiners. I would also like to thank my Ph.D committee, George Helffrich and Alison
Rust for their helpful reviews of my work, and also James Wookey for all his helpful shear-wave
splitting codes, and most notably for providing (and troubleshooting) the SHEBA routines. I would
like to thank all those that have worked with me in the Bristol Geophysics Group during my time
here - Glenn Jones (titis aye), James Hammond, Kit Chambers, Ricky Ramalho, Jenny Caddick, Ian
‘WGGW’ Bastow, ‘scruffy’ Dave Thompson, Othman Al-Harrasi, Andreas ‘Dr Sausage’ Wüstefeld,
Andy Nowacki, and Jenny Di Leo - for their assistance, advice and friendship. It has been a pleasure
to work with you all.
Finally I would like to thank my parents for funding, and inspiring, so much of my education over
the last 26 years.
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