PESA WA: September Technical Evening Presentation: Professor Stephen Flint

The SLOPE and LOBE industry consortium projects have supported 25 years of data collection in exceptional exposures of deep-water slope and basin floor reservoir analogues, supplemented by fully cored boreholes in the Permian Karoo basin of South Africa. Results reveal a complex but well-ordered system of depositional sequences. The ‘Karoo Model’ includes a clear physical hierarchy of architectural elements in basin floor and intra-slope lobes and in slope valleys/canyons, which allows prediction of down-system trends. Evolving slope morphology drives an upward change from attached to detached terminal lobes, with implications for stratigraphic traps and CCUS projects. The ‘Karoo model’ has been critically tested on the Cretaceous greenhouse forearc basin coarse grained slope systems of the Rosario Formation, Baja California. Slope valley/canyon systems have geometries, asymmetric basal cuts and asymmetric fill characteristics to the late icehouse Karoo. The Rosario adds an up-dip system pinch out dataset with features very similar to modern canyon heads. Many components of these studies form the basis for a new project LOBESTORE, which adds work on the spatial and temporal distribution of minerals likely to be reactive during and after CO2 injection within CCUS projects.