SAFARI Phase 4

The most common form of analogues is outcrops, and SafariDB contains information on 300+ outcrops. More than half of the outcrops have photorealistic virtual outcrop models (VO) associated to them which can be accessed through a purpose built, online 3D web viewer. They cover a wide spectrum of depositional environments, basin types and palaeoclimates. The outcrops are also a source of geometric data for reservoir modelling and the database contains over 5500 measurements.

In Phase 3 new tools were also developed for extracting semi-variograms and MPS training images. The database includes a purpose-built map GIS tool for finding modern analogues, filtered by depositional environment, climate and basin type; data on shallow seismic analogues and a newly developed production database – all linked through the common SAFARI data standard.

The main theme for Safari phase 4 is expanding upon the existing platform to incorporate analogues for a broader range of reservoir systems, following the philosophy that has been successfully developed and implemented over the past ten years. There are three principal goals for Phase 4:

1. To expand the breadth of SAFARI to incorporate a boarder range of geologies, including carbonates, structural geology and potentially other reservoir related systems;
2. To expand the functionality of the database and allow faster and more comprehensive analysis of the analogue data. This will use AI and Machine Learning and to better analyse data within the database; a variety of new tools to generate synthetic seismic data from analogues and, improved user functionality;
3. To significantly grow the database through collecting new data (e.g. student projects), crowd sourcing public data and strategic partnerships with other research institutions to implement for example process based models as a further source of analogue data.