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The Subsurface Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) team has deep expertise in geocellular faulted framework and numerical property modeling. Team members have worked extensively with subsurface software packages and have developed novel applications, from statewide reservoir models to fine-scale wellbore models. The team's conventional oil and gas industry experience has also been applied to a variety of emerging energy research areas including natural hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, and geothermal.

The Subsurface Dynamics Laboratory provides geophysical oversight for all stages of geophysical surveying. This includes oversight of contractor planning, survey design and permitting ahead of acquisition, and initial processing phase. The SDL team has decades of experience conducting interpretation, velocity modeling, and geomodeling in tandem with pre-stack depth (PSDM) migration. We also specialize in post-stack processing for image enhancement, attribute analysis, fault identification, and quantitative interpretation, including AVO(AZ) analysis. The SDL provides synthetic ties of well data with seismic for time-depth correlations in addition to the essential step of integrating well-based petrophysical and geomechanical models. We leverage new processing and acquisition technologies that yield high-fold, high signal-to-noise results that go beyond structural interpretation and enable impactful decision making for exploration, well planning, and reservoir characterization.

The SDL draws from more than 160 years of KGS data collection and management, able to leverage the United States's most comprehensive well-log database along with a bore hole core repository of more than 7,000 wells and project-based, modern, petrophysical well logging data to develop world-class petrophysical and well-based geomechanical models. Current projects include using nuclear spectroscopy well logging to characterize rare earth mineral potential and geomechanical modeling for carbon capture and sequestration projects to ensure decades of safe and economic injection. We leverage recent developments in open-hole and cased-hole logging technology to detect bypassed pay zones in oil and gas wells and areas of enriched mineral content and to develop accurate mineralogical models. The SDL also integrates data collected from our Multi-Sensor Core Logger (MSCL) to gain valuable insights into rock composition, fabric and texture as well as invaluable calibration for well-based and other field acquisition data. Integrating these results on multiple scales is key, and these analyses provide a valuable starting point for large scale subsurface numerical and flow simulation modeling.

The SDL team has decades of experience in developing, verifying, maintaining, and applying reservoir simulators for modeling coupled hydrologic, thermal, geomechanical, and geochemical (THMC) processes. Team members have been pushing the boundaries for what is possible in modeling subsurface systems through innovations in conceptual theories, numerical algorithms, and computational implementations. Notable innovations include models for vegetative surface barriers, ternary gas hydrate systems to investigate guest-molecule exchange, numerically efficient carbon dioxide injection wells with trajectory deviations, full THMC coupling, nonwetting fluid entrapment with reversal-point tracking, nonaqueous-liquid residual formation in the vadose zone, embedded fractures for assessing enhanced geothermal system (EGS) performance, embedded boreholes for assessing closed-loop geothermal systems, and parallel implementations under the Message Passing Interface (MPI) protocols. The team is currently addressing challenges in modeling both geologic-time generation and subsequent accumulation of hydrogen and stimulated generation of hydrogen from mafic and ultra-mafic basalts. This later challenge will draw on the team’s previous expertise in embedded fracture modeling for EGS. Innovation is at the core of the SDL’s modeling approaches by seeking methodologies that allow solutions to complex subsurface problems. An equivalent core value is quality assurance where innovations in modeling are validated against laboratory or field observations and code comparison studies. A third core value is preservation—preservation of developed computer codes through configuration management and preservation of simulation applications through the Kansas Geological Survey’s mass storage system. In addition to these core values, the SDL team actively transfers its developed software via short courses and open-literature publications.