Giant Regional Play Fairways from Modern Seismic Data

A new deep water exploration trend has emerged as a number of key wells drilled recently in North West Africa have started to open the door to a low risk play that has achieved stunning success to date and looks set to draw the industry into exploring a new play type down on the basin floor. Previous to this Petrobras’s discoveries in Brazil’s Sergipe basin have shown that not only can the deep water be incredibly rewarding, with fast development opportunities, but it is also rich in oil. Recently, Exxon’s discoveries in Guyana have highlighted the great potential in stratigraphic traps, while the Ranger discovery has highlighted the positive role of magmatism in the development of petroleum systems.

Regional petroleum systems evaluation of an extensive 2D seismic database with global coverage has been carried out in order to identify future exploration frontiers. Modern seismic, smarter geoscience models and enhanced drilling techniques, will open frontier areas to explore new play fairways never accessible before: the base-of-slope and basin floor fans of the South Atlantic, where prospect resource potential is created and determined by plate scale geometries, Guyana stratigraphic analogues and the multiple play types offshore Somalia to name but a few.