Postgraduate awarded 2017 AAPG grant

Congratulations to postgraduate student Isra’a Abu-Mahfouz, who has been awarded a prestigious 2017 AAPG grant.

The purpose of the AAPG Foundation Grants-in-Aid program is to foster research in the geosciences. Grants are made to provide financial assistance to graduate students whose thesis research has application to the search for and development of petroleum and energy-mineral resources, and/or to related environmental geology issues.

Isra’a’s DPhil project, on the Characterization of Fractured Hydrocarbon Reservoirs, focuses on understanding the causal links among interacting stratigraphic architecture, diagenesis, fluid migration, and fracturing; and aims and to set the fractures in the structural and basin evolutional context in order to evaluate their effects on hydrocarbon migration and the potential for economic production.

Describing her prject, Isra’a explained: “This study will help us test whether fractures coincide with hydrocarbon maturation and migration in a shale-hosted hydrocarbon play. The importance of this study is that this work is the first comprehensive study of natural fracture systems in the late Cretaceous through Eocene which is an actual petroleum resource containing abundant natural fractures and hence this study will have scientific and operational significances at the same time.”

Find out more about the AAPG programme.

Find out more about graduate study in the department.

Isra’a’s project is part of the wider Earth Resources research theme.