News

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Badley Ashton and Associates Ltd are pleased to announce they will be collaborating with the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at Newcastle University on a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) funded PhD research project. The project entitled "How depositional properties dictate the early diagenetic pathways and reservoir quality of sandstones" will be primarily supervised by former Badley Ashton staff member Dr. Sanem Acikalin, alongside Dr. Cees van der Land of Newcastle University and Prof. Richard Worden of the University of Liverpool. The funding comprises all of the tuition fees, annual living expenses of £14,296 and £5,000 per annum Research Training Support Grant covering a 4 year study period.

Badley Ashton has agreed to support the project and will also be providing technical support and guidance. Negotiations regarding the exact form this will take are ongoing, but it is anticipated that the successful candidate will spend some portion of their time working in the Badley Ashton offices. 

The study aims to fill the gap between large-scale sedimentological studies and pore-scale observations to form a complete picture of the early developments within a sandstone reservoir. It will focus on the paralic depositional settings, as they are often linked to porosity-preserving early-diagenetic chlorite formation and will use examples from Cretaceous deltaic succession in Utah and Holocene cores from the Ravenglass Estuary in the UK. The main tasks will include field work to build the sedimentological background (including core and outcrop logging, correlation, process interpretation and sampling), and sandstone petrography to define textural properties, grain composition, detrital clay types and diagenetic phases.

The deadline for applications is at the end of January. If you would like to find out more information about the study and details on the application process, please click on the link below.

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