Executive Summary

On March 3, 2000, 45 representatives of the petroleum, geotechnical, and scientific drilling communities met in Houston for the “GeoFluids of Overpressured Strata in the Gulf of Mexico Workshop.” Participants set an ambitious goal for the application of scientific drilling on the continental slope: the development of a ‘grand unified theory’ that characterized and modeled the state and interactions of pressure, stress, sedimentation, and rock deformation in the first 1000 meters below the sea floor. The proposed initiative will build on generations of theoretical work within the geotechnical, geological, and hydrogeological communities, and it will be applied to the unique setting of the deepwater continental slope. Ultimately this model will be used to understand the dynamic behavior of continental margins and to predict, based on remotely sensed data, the in-situ conditions at any location. These advances will complement ongoing ODP efforts to understand hydrogeological processes, will provide fundamental measurements that will allow the petroleum industry to optimize deepwater exploration and production, and will position ocean drilling for a new generation of exciting science within the IODP.

The 1-day workshop was funded by Conoco and the Joint Oceanographic Institute/United States Scientific Support Program. It brought together 32 representatives of the petroleum industry, 3 geotechnical specialists, 8 academic scientists affiliated with ODP, and 2 ODP-TAMU (Texas A&M University) representatives. The morning was spent defining common technical problems and bridging disciplinary language divides. Industry representatives described their experiences drilling shallow geopressures and proposed possible experiments that would assist their understanding of shallow flow processes. Geotechnical specialists described the array of geotechnical measurements that are possible in a shallow borehole. ODP veterans described the capability of the J.R., and the successes and failures of previous hydrogeological experiments. The real work began in the afternoon. First, technical questions of greatest common interest were ranked as a group. Second, three subgroups were formed to address: a) what do we want to measure? b) where do we want to measure it? and c) how will industry and ODP collaborate to achieve these measurements? Workshop results can be viewed at http://hydro.geosc.psu.edu/Odp/odp.html.

Agenda

Friday March 3, 2000

AM	Coffee
7:45-8:00	Workshop Goals	Alan Huffman (Conoco)
8:00-8:15	The Common Scientific Ground in GeoFluids in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico	Flemings (Penn State)
8:15-8:45	Geopressures in near surface Gulf of Mexico sediments	John Pelletier (Shell)
8:45-9:00	Why are shallow rock properties important to subsurface evaluations	Mike Maler (Shell)
9:00-9:20	In situ characterization of stress, strength, and hydraulic properties	Jean Benoit (University of New Hampshire)
9:20-9:40	Profiling Stress History by In-situ Tests	Paul Mayne (Georgia Institute of Technology)
9:40-10:00	Direct and indirect measurements of pressure in deepwater Gulf of Mexico sediments	Armand Silva (University of New Hampshire)
10:00-10:15	Break-
10:15-10:30	Seismic Experiments in Accretionary Wedges	Harold Tobin (New Mexico Tech)
10:15-10:30	Previous hydrogeological exper-iments on the D/V Joides Resolution	Demian Saffer (U.S. Geological Survey_
10:30-11:00	In-situ measurements of hydrogeological processes	Keir Becker (University of Miami)
11:00-11:30	Piezoprope Pressure Measurements and packer stress measurements	Jean Audibert, Stephen Taylor (Fugro-McClelland Marine Geosciences, Inc.)
11:30-12:30	Lunch
12:30-1:00	What do we want to know? (10 minute presentations from attendees)
1:00-	What do we want to learn
2:00-3:30	Break-out Sessions

Table of Contents

Executive Summary

Agenda