Award Winners
An important and integral part of the role of a professional association such as EAGE is to recognize and honour the scientific advances and achievements made by its members. As such, we are happy to announce below the winners of this year's awards.
Tadeusz W. Patzek
Winner of the Desiderius Erasmus Award 2020
Tadeusz (Tad) Patzek is a professor and petroleum industry analyst at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. Previous to this he was Chair of the Department of Petroleum Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was educated at the University of Minnesota and in his native Poland. Prof. Patzek has a wide range of interests, related to energy, the environment and climate change.
He is renowned for his research into the fundamentals of multiphase flow in porous media with application to improved oil recovery, his predictions of productivity from shale gas formations, and his life-cycle analysis of biofuels. He is one of the few people active in the petroleum field, who are also sufficiently confident and expert to comment on environmental issues, fearlessly articulating the grave threats to the planet from climate change, deforestation and other environmental damage, while exposing the fallacies of many of the proposed solutions to these problems. He is an inspiring mentor and educator whose fierce intellectualism and unflinching pursuit of truth has won widespread admiration.
André Revil
Winner of the Conrad Schlumberger Award 2020
Dr Revil’s work focuses on the development of coupled hydraulic-electrical conductivity models in porous media and the fundamental understanding of grain surface electrical conduction phenomena. He is considered a leader both in the field of hydrogeophysics and the most recognized expert in the subject of electrical and electromagnetic properties of saturated rocks.
Through experiments and theory, Dr. Revil has redefined the concepts of spontaneous potential and induced polarization as used by formation evaluation specialists and applied exploration geophysicists around the world, thus shaping the way we interpret electrical signatures for quantifying near-surface properties and dynamics. His contributions are both foundational and practical. He provided a mechanistic framework for linking electrical conductivity and permeability in both clean and shaly sands. Importantly, he also found that even totally clay-free rock formations exhibit an appreciable amount of surface conductivity for freshwater aquifers, a point that is often neglected in applications. He and his co-authors also considered seismoelectric sources through a unified, coupled model of hydromechanical and electromagnetic disturbances in porous media. Revil is also an active member of the Geosciences communities who provides excellent service to the professional community — he serves as editor and associate editor for several important refereed journal publications, helped organize a significant number of workshops and technical/scientific conferences on Geosciences frontier topics, and co-edited the text Applied Hydrogeophysics. His originality in experimental design and his infectious scientific curiosity are a source of inspiration to many in the community.
Dr. Pejman Tahmasebi
Winner of the Arie van Weelden Award 2020
Dr. Pejman Tahmasebi is nominated for the 2020 Arie van Weelden Award. Among his many scientific achievements he is recognised for his outstanding work in two major fields: description of large-scale porous media (LSPM), including oil reservoirs, and the problem of reconstruction of a 3D model from a 2D slice. Dr. Tahmasebi developed what is now called cross-correlation based geostatistical simulation.
Using a novel cross-correlation function, he showed that his method produces highly accurate realizations of the LSPM that honour the available data and provide predictions for those properties for which no data are used in constructing the model. The computations are very fast and the memory requirements are modest. This work is frequently cited and widely used by the oil industry. Dr. Tahmasebi has also developed a solution to the classical reconstruction problem: Given a single 2D slice image of a 3D porous medium, is it possible to produce a 3D model for the whole medium? He has shown his method works in a wide variety of systems, including brain images, a human lung, a river delta, granular packing of particles and many more. For his excellent work he received the 2017 Andrei Borisovich Vistelius Research Award from the International Association of Mathematical Geosciences. Dr. Tahmasebi is a truly brilliant and creative researcher, whose work has had great impact in geosciences. He richly deserves the Arie van Weelden Award.
Gladys Gonzalez
Winner of the Honorary Membership Award 2020
Gladys Gonzalez is nominated for Honorary Membership of EAGE for her outstanding achievements as a geoscientist and for her even more impressive and important leadership achievements in EAGE, particularly as President-Elect and President, 2012-2014. Gladys was the first female President of EAGE. As President, she took some bold but necessary decisions, creating a much-improved relationship between the EAGE Board and the EAGE office.
She started a reorganization that resulted in a clearer description of the roles of both the Board of EAGE and the Board of Directors running the EAGE office. It was a huge task, requiring great courage, which she accomplished with tremendous compassion, professionalism, dedication and strength. In addition, her vision for the Association resulted in initiatives like Vision 2020, the Women in Geoscience community and the Young Professionals community. Because of her professional achievements and great accomplishments during her presidency, Gladys Gonzalez deserves EAGE's recognition with the 2020 Honorary Membership Award.
Ian F. Jones
Winner of the Nigel Anstey Award 2020
For the paper “Tutorial: the mechanics of waveform inversion”, First Break, Volume 37, No 5, May 2019.Full waveform inversion (FWI) methods are becoming widely used to provide high resolution velocity models for use in migrating data from complex regions, and constraining impedance inversions. This paper is pitched perfectly and appeals to a range of readers, from students entering FWI and wanting to understand the basics, to industry professionals looking for a clear discussion of the subject.
The detailed explanation of how each step of the FWI process is carried out is particularly helpful. The excellent list of references provided allows readers to delve further into the subject. Ian Jones’ paper provides an exceptionally well explained overview of the FWI method, and is already being used widely as a go-to reference on the subject.
Tor Arne Johansen
Winners of the Loránd Eötvös Award 2020
Co-authors: Bent Ole Ruud, Ronny Tømmerbakke, and Kristian Jensen
For their paper “Seismic on floating ice: data acquisition versus flexural wave noise”, published in Geophysical Prospecting, Vol. 67(3), March 2019.Seismic surveying in the Arctic must honor restrictions that forbid disturbing or harming wildlife and causing permanent footprints. The choice of measurement acquisition parameters must strike a balance between optimum data quality and environmental constraints.
Seismic data acquired on floating ice are hampered by pervasive noise due to ice vibrations related to highly dispersive ice flexural waves generated by the seismic source. The authors conducted detailed and difficult experiments on floating ice in van Mijenfjorden in Svalbard in the Norwegian Arctic to analyse the impact of flexural waves recorded with various seismic receivers and sources deployed both on top of the ice and in the water below. Measurements indicate that flexural waves are severely damped at 5 m or deeper below the ice, while hydrophone data suffer less from these vibrations compared with data recorded on the ice. The authors communicate their experience with great clarity and provide outstanding supportive illustrations. They conclude that seismic mapping of deep seismic horizons seems to be best achieved using 25-m long geophone strings and an airgun source. For shallow targets, the use of hydrophones in combination with detonating cord is an appropriate solution.
Quinten Boersma
Winners of the Norman Falcon Award 2020
Co-authors: Rahul Prabhakaran, Francisco Hilario Bezerra, and Giovanni Bertotti
For their paper “Linking natural fractures to karst cave development: a case study combining drone imagery, a natural cave network and numerical modelling”, published in Petroleum Geoscience, Volume 25(4), November 2019.
The paper uses a wide variety of techniques that encompass outcrop analysis, drone imagery and fluid-flow modeling to address a difficult problem in reservoir characterization: mapping the fracture and cave network of carbonate formations. Flow in carbonate formations that host either hydrocarbon or geothermal reservoirs is notoriously difficult to predict due to the high variability in the pore space and fracture systems, posing significant challenges in well completion as well as reservoir management. The paper is novel and of wide interest to the community as it integrates a multiscale approach of structural field data analysis with numerical modeling to define the correlation between fractures, fluid flow and large karst conduits. The research offers a great resource to our community looking to gain insight into structural mapping and modeling of carbonate reservoirs.
Bernhard Siemon
Winners of the Ludger Mintrop Award 2020
Co-authors: Esther van Baaren, Willem Dabekaussen, Joost Delsman, Wim Dubelaar, Marios Karaoulis, and Annika Steuer
For their paper “Automatic identification of fresh-saline groundwater interfaces from airborne electromagnetic data in Zeeland, the Netherlands”, published in Near Surface Geophysics, Volume 17(1), February 2019.
This paper addresses the challenge of finding the boundary between saline and fresh ground water using helicopter-borne electromagnetic surveys. In the light of decreasing supplies of freshwater in many countries around the world, this is an issue of great importance.
This work introduces a novel approach to invert and analyse helicopter-borne electromagnetic data to derive the thicknesses of freshwater lenses and corresponding fresh–saline groundwater interfaces within a certain resistivity range. The bounds of this range were found to be predominantly correlated with the fresh or saline water and appeared to be almost independent of the lithology type. This makes the method applicable without further modification to geological formations in many environments. The results of the new approach were verified in the field by complementary geophysical and geochemical data.
This work can significantly improve the search for fresh water in many areas of the world, wherever the cost of a helicopter survey can be borne. The ability to map salinity may also contribute to agricultural land management. In addition, repeated surveys to monitor changes in the fresh/saline water boundary will help to determine sustainable rates of fresh water extraction.
Jinyu Zhang
Jinyu Zhang
Winners of the Robert Mitchum Award 2020
Co-authors: Peter M. Burgess, Didier Granjeon, and Ronald Steel
For their paper “Automatic identification of fresh-saline groundwater interfaces from airborne electromagnetic data in Zeeland, the Netherlands”, published in Near Surface Geophysics, Volume 17(1), February 2019.
The authors apply numerical stratigraphic forward modelling to compare stratal geometries forced by cyclic changes in relative sea level with stratal geometries forced by sediment discharge and water discharge changes. The results suggest that both relative sea-level oscillations and variations in sediment/water discharge ratio are able to form sequence-bounding unconformities independently, confirming previous qualitative sequence definitions.
The authors propose that the supply-dominated sequences could be recognised in outcrop or in the subsurface if the observations of stratal offlap and the absence of coastal-plain topset can be made without any strong evidence of relative sea-level fall. These quantitative results suggest that both supply-dominated and accommodation-dominated sequences are likely to occur in the ancient record, as a consequence of multiple, possibly complex, controls.
Erik F. M. Koene
Erik F. M. Koene
Winners of the Guido Bonarelli Award 2020
Co-authors: Jens Wittsten, Johan O. A. Robertsson, and Fredrik Andersson
For the oral paper “Eliminating Time Dispersion from Visco-Elastic Simulations with Memory Variables”, presented at the 81st EAGE Conference & Exhibition, London 2019.
The paper addresses the problem of modelling 3D wave propagation in visco-elastic media using the finite-difference method.
In recent years, it has been recognized that the seismic wave equation solved with a finite-difference method in the time causes a predictable and removable error through the use of time-dispersion transforms. The authors demonstrate that the time dispersion transforms remain applicable when the visco-elastic wave equation is solved with memory variables, as is commonly done.
The crucial insight is that both the wave equation and the memory variables are computed with the same time-dispersion error. They show how the time-dispersion transforms can be implemented in, for example, MATLAB, and demonstrate the developed theory on a visco-elastic version of the Marmousi model. The time dispersion transforms allow computation of the visco-elastic wave equation with large steps in time without significant loss of accuracy, and without having to make any modifications to the model.
Andreas Michael
Andreas Michael
Winners of the Louis Cagniard Award 2020
Co-author: Ipsita Gupta
This year the field of candidates for the Cagniard Award, for the best poster presented at the EAGE Annual Meeting, was exceptionally strong, with several entries receiving top marks from the judges for presentation and scientific content.
EAGE decided to give the award to Andreas Michael from Louisiana State University for his work in the Production and Management EOR session. This work is notable for its significant contribution to the understanding and prediction of hydraulic fracturing behaviour.
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