More than 200 plugs from outcrop and a nearby borehole in a carbonaceous siliciclastic interval of Late Jurassic (Kimmeridgian to Tithonian) age were quantitatively analyzed for texture, mineralogy, and acoustic properties. Our primary goal was to study the effect of clay (fraction smaller than 8 μm), silt/sand (fraction larger than 8 μm), and carbonate on the acoustic properties. The quantitative nature and volume of the data made it possible to observe four-dimensional relationships in contoured ternary diagrams. Primary control on the acoustic properties is exerted by porosity, but the trend of this relationship significantly deviates from popular velocity transforms. The contribution of clay, silt/sand, and carbonate particular material and cement explains the remaining variation in acoustic properties. Although no clear linear thresholds are defined, a general trend is that clay and carbonate content have opposite and overlapping effects on acoustic properties, the influence of clay content progressively increases with decreasing carbonate content, and visa versa. With increasing carbonate content, the variation of acoustic velocity at a given porosity value increases to nearly twice of that in the clay-dominated sediment. Traditional classification boundaries are present but strongly overprinted by this interplay between clay and carbonate. This study may have important implications for porosity and lithofacies prediction from wireline logs in similar mixtures of sediment. In addition, the quantitative character of the textural and mineralogical data may provide a direct link from acoustic properties to the primary depositional system and sequence stratigraphy.@en

A joint AAPG-Society of Petroleum Engineers-Society of Exploration Geophysicists Hedberg Research Conference was held in Saint-Cyr sur Mer, France, on July 8 to 13, 2012, to review current research and explore future research directions related to improved production from carbonate reservoirs. Eighty-seven scientists from academia and industry (split roughly equally) attended for five days. A primary objective for the conference was to explore novel connections among different disciplines (primarily within geoscience and reservoir engineering) as a way to define new research opportunities. Research areas represented included carbonate sedimentology and stratigraphy, structural geology, geomechanics, hydrology, reactive transport modeling, seismic imaging (including four-dimensional seismic, tomography, and seismic forward modeling), geologic modeling and forward modeling of geologic processes, petrophysics, statistical methods, numerical methods for simulation, reservoir engineering, pore-scale processes, in-situ flow experiments (e.g., x-ray computed tomography), visualization, and methods for data interaction.@en