June, 2007 - Houston, Texas-C&C Reservoirs' José I. Guzmán, Rod Sloan, Shengyu Wu, and Shaoqing Sun have been announced recipients of AAPG 2007 Jules Braunstein Memorial Award for their poster "A Comprehensive Classification of Seals Based on Worldwide Subsurface Analogs" presented in the 2007 AAPG Annual Convention held on April 1-4 in Long Beach, CA. Apart from an instant cash award, each of the winners will be recognized and presented a walnut plaque during the opening ceremony at the 2008 AAPG Annual Convention in San Antonio, Texas.

The Jules Braunstein Memorial Award is given each year at AAPG annual convention in recognition of the best poster session paper presented the previous year for its outstanding scientific significance, its originality and creativity, its practical usefulness as well as its organization and appearance.

The award-winning poster originates from and highlights the recent addition to C&C's E&P Treatise series, "Understanding Seals", which is a non-exclusive study based on analysis of nearly 1000 reservoirs from around the world. By taking into consideration of top seals, bottom seals, lateral seals, fault seals, intra-reservoir seals and unconventional seals in terms of their geological and geomechanical characteristics and their impact on trapping geometry and hydrocarbon columns, the study bridges between deterministic research on hydrocarbon seals and empirical analysis derived from economic traps and establishes a new seals classification with three end-members and 20 combinations.

The new seals classification scheme marks a unique contribution to the upstream oil and gas industry. It provides the foundation for a systematic checklist of parameters that must be accounted for when evaluating the seal chance of success. The DIGITAL ANALOGS Knowledge System has also been enhanced by including additional seal parameters as a by-product of this study.