Previous and Recent Employees

Jonathan Wonham

I was recruited to the GRC in 1996 from Imperial College where I had been working as a postdoctoral researcher. While at the GRC I headed the 3D sedimentary modelling research project. This project focused on improving the geological realism of subsurface reservoir models through the integration of seismic data and stratigraphic modelling techniques. These studies were rewarded by Total (then Elf) with the Rodin prize. A paper resulting from research into the formation of a deep water turbidite canyon fill from offshore Gabon was presented at the 1998 AAPG Hedberg Conference in Spain and became one of the top ten electronic article downloads from the journal Marine and Petroleum Geology's website in 2000.

In 1998, I transferred from the GRC to work in operations in Aberdeen. During this time I was employed as the reservoir geologist responsible for Elgin-Franklin field, the largest field developed in the North Sea during the 1990s. Because of its extreme depth and temperature, this field presented many challenges, not least in understanding the diagenetic processes associated with very deep burial of reservoir rocks. Many successful research studies in UK universities were initiated in relation to this field, notably the GeoPOP project at the University of Durham. My own studies on the sedimentology and diagenesis of the field, together with specialists from Total's technical centre in Pau, won recognition in the form of a special mention of the Norman Falcon Award by the EAGE and a Total Communication prize in 2003.

From 2003 to the present I have been working as a Senior Geologist on several different projects for Total's Reservoir Evaluation group at the company's head office in Paris. In 2005, I presented my team's studies of the N'Kossa Field to the AAPG International Conference which took place in Paris. The N'Kossa field, situated offshore Congo, is a structurally complex reservoir composed of heterogeneous reservoir types. The field is a 'raft' structure which, as the name suggests, means that the whole field has been laterally displaced in the geological past, gliding more than 20 km towards the mid-Atlantic on a bed of deformable salt. Geological studies of this field show how important the close integration of sedimentology, structural geology and petrography can be in assisting the planning of future satellite developments and infill wells.