Our Team
Satinder Chopra
Satinder Chopra received M.Sc. and M.Phil. degrees in physics from H. P. University, Shimla, India. He joined Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC), the leading national oil company of India in 1984 and served there till 1997. In 1998 he joined CTC Pulsonic at Calgary, which later became Scott Pickford and Core Laboratories Reservoir Technologies. In November 2004 he joined Arcis Seismic Solutions, Calgary, which in turn was bought by TGS in 2012. He worked at TGS, Calgary as Chief Geophysicist (Reservoir) till July 2020. In September 2020, Satinder started his own company, SamiGeo Consulting Ltd. along with his buddy Dr. Ritesh Kumar Sharma.
In the last 36 years Satinder has worked in regular seismic processing and interactive interpretation but has spent more time in special processing of seismic data involving seismic attributes including coherence, curvature and texture attributes, seismic inversion, AVO, VSP processing and frequency enhancement of seismic data. His research interests focus on techniques that are aimed at characterization of reservoirs. He has published 8 books and more than 480 papers and abstracts and likes to make presentations at any beckoning opportunity. He has been the CSEG Distinguished Lecturer for 2010-2011, the AAPG/SEG Fall Distinguished Lecturer for 2011-2012, and the EAGE e-Distinguished Lecturer for 2014-15. He is the Past Chief Editor of the CSEG RECORDER, the past member of the SEG ‘The Leading Edge’ and ‘Geophysics’ Editorial Boards, and the Ex-Chairman of the SEG Publications Committee. At present, he is the editor of the AAPG Explorer Geophysical Corner, and the ‘Canadian Journal of Exploration Geophysics’.
He is the recipient of several awards at ONGC, CSEG, SEG, AAPG and APEGA and more recently received the 2019 AAPG Distinguished Service Award, the 2017 EAGE Honorary Membership Award, was the Honoree at the 2017 CSEG Symposium, received the 2016 APEGA Fellow of Engineers Canada Award, has received the ‘SEG Best Poster’ Award for his paper entitled ‘Churning seismic attributes with principal component analysis’, presented at the 2014 SEG Convention held at Denver, the 2014 CSEG Honourary Membership Award, the APEGA ‘Fellow Geoscientists Canada’ and the ‘2013 Frank Spragins Technical Award’, the ‘2013 AAPG Jules Braunstein Award’ for the Best Poster Presentation at the Annual Convention, the 2012 GeoConvention Best Poster Award (as co-author) for the poster entitled ‘Determination of Elastic Constants using Extended Elastic Impedance’, the AAPG George C. Matson Award for the ‘Best Oral Presentation’ for his paper entitled ‘Delineating stratigraphic features via cross-plotting of seismic discontinuity attributes and their volume visualization’, presented at the 2010 AAPG Annual Convention held at New Orleans, the ‘Top 10 Paper’ Award for his poster entitled ‘Extracting meaningful information from seismic attributes’, presented at the 2009 AAPG Annual Convention held at Denver, the ‘Best Poster’ Award for his paper entitled ‘Seismic attributes for fault/fracture characterization’, presented at the 2008 SEG Convention held at Las Vegas, the ‘Best Paper’ Award for his paper entitled ‘Curvature and iconic Coherence-Attributes adding value to 3D Seismic Data Interpretation’ presented at the CSEG Technical Luncheon, Calgary, in January 2007 and the 2005 CSEG Meritorious Services Award. He and his colleagues have received the CSEG Best Poster Awards in successive years from 2002 to 2005. In addition to all the above accolades, Satinder’s presentations at the SEG have been adjudged to be in the Top30 of all the presentations made at the Convention in 2008, 2010, 2015 and 2017.
He is a member of SEG, CSEG, CSPG, EAGE, AAPG, and APEGA (Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta). He is an APEGA Professional Geophysicist.
Dr. Ritesh K. Sharma
Ritesh received his Master’s in applied geophysics from Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India in 2007. Thereafter, he served as a geophysicist at Hindustan Zinc Limited, Udaipur, India for a year. In 2008, he moved to Calgary for pursuing higher studies at the University of Calgary with CREWES group and obtained MSc. in geophysics in 2011. Later, he joined TGS, Canada where he worked as a senior reservoir geoscientist till July 2020. During his time with TGS, he gained PhD in geophysics from the University of Calgary in 2019.
He has vast experience of working with 2D/3D, land and marine seismic data projects with different applications such as AVO analysis, rock-physics analysis, frequency enhancement of seismic data, simultaneous inversion, extended elastic impedance inversion as well as geostatistical inversion. He has worked on multi-component seismic data too for characterizing a reservoir. Additionally, he has been involved in analyzing azimuthal variation of velocity along with amplitude to estimate fracture orientation and fracture intensity, which are vital in developing low permeability unconventional plays, since last many years. He also has expertise in identifying favourable zones for hydraulic fracturing based on fracability analysis.
He has delivered around 70 oral and poster presentations at different internal conventions including SEG, CSEG, EAGE and AAPG. He has published more than 50 papers in the renowned journals. He has won the best poster award for his presentation entitled ‘Determination of elastic constants using extended elastic impedance’, at the 2012 GeoConvention held at Calgary. He also received the Jules Braunstein Memorial Award for the best AAPG poster presentation entitled ‘New attribute for determination of lithology and brittleness’, at the 2013 AAPG Annual Convention & Exhibition held at Pittsburgh. He has received CSEG Honorable Mention for the Best Recorder Paper award in 2013. In addition to them he has been recipient of Honorable Mention Best Poster Paper in SEG 2017.He is an active member of SEG and CSEG.