Dr Keyu Liu is working on oil migration and fluid history analysis.

Dr Keyu Liu: developing new tools for assessing oil occurrence in petroleum reservoirs

Dr Keyu Liu is a principal research scientist and research team leader at CSIRO working on a number of projects including developing new spectroscopic methods for detecting oils.

• 10 June 2010 | Updated 14 October 2011

Overview

• Current activities
• Background
• Academic qualifications
• Achievements

Current activities

Dr Keyu Liu leads research on the use of fluorescence spectroscopy for oil exploration and appraisal and has research interests in:

• fluorescence spectroscopy of oils and inclusions
• reservoir characterisation and petrophysics
• quantitative sequence stratigraphy.

Dr Liu is also involved in the Microbial and CO2 Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR) project.

Dr Liu is an adjunct professor of the China University of Petroleum and is currently conducting a number of collaborative research projects with colleagues from China.

Background

Dr Keyu Liu joined CSIRO as a research scientist in 1998 working on oil migration and fluid history analysis in a number of research areas, including:

• Dr Liu led the Australian Petroleum Cooperative Research Centre (APCRC) Oil Migration Pathway project, 1999-2004.

  application of quantitative fluorescence techniques in petroleum exploration and appraisal
• predicting and detecting oil migration pathways
• fluid history analysis
• well log analysis and reservoir modelling
• clastic sedimentology and quantitative sequence stratigraphic modelling.

Dr Liu’s main research focus has been the development of a number of detection and prediction technologies and techniques for the investigation of oil migration and charge history for petroleum reservoirs.

These technologies and techniques are now regularly used by the oil industry.

Dr Liu also:

• led the Australian Petroleum Cooperative Research Centre (APCRC) Oil Migration Pathway project, 1999-2004
• has developed the Oil Migration Interval (OMI) technique for predicting oil migration pathways
• led the coreflodding component of the Microbially Enhanced Oil Recover project (2007-10)
• led a number of major commercial and research projects on hydrocarbon charge history in:
  • Australasia
  • South-East Asia and China including Canning Basin
  • Gippsland Basin
  • Papua New Guinea foreland basins
  • the Great Southern Basin
  • New Zealand
  • the Mekong Basin
  • Vietnam
  • the Jiyang Sub-basin and Tarim Basin, China.

He has worked on many commercial hydrocarbon fluid history projects with a number of oil companies from Australia and around the world.

He has been the manager of the Quantitative Grain Fluorescence (QGF) laboratory since 2000 and the Research Team Leader of the Fluid History Analysis group since 2007.

Prior to his present position, Dr Liu held various post-doctoral fellow and research fellow positions at:

• CSIRO Petroleum
• Adelaide University, South Australia
• James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland.

In these positions he worked on:

• reservoir characterisation
• forward stratigraphic modeling
• clastic sedimentology
• petroleum migration and charge history analysis
• enhanced oil recovery.

Academic qualifications

Dr Liu has been awarded a:

• Bachelor of Science from Qingdao University of Ocean, China
• Master of Science from The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
• Doctor of Philosophy from the Australian National University in Canberra, in the Australian Capital Territory.

His doctoral work specialised in clastic sedimentology and collision zone tectonics in Papua New Guinea.

Achievements

Dr Liu was identified as a seminal contributor to the sustained team effort to address issues in petroleum exploration and production which led to the award of 2005 CSIRO Medal for Research Achievement to the fluid history team.

The QGF team led by Dr Liu was awarded CSIRO Petroleum’s Innovation Award in 2003.

Dr Liu has 30 ISI cited papers, two patents, three theses, 30 non-ISI cited papers, over 50 technical presentations and has been co-author of over 50 technical reports.

Read more about Award-winning ways to appraise oil and gas deposits.