Frogtech believes that its multi-client Guyana Suriname study will help clear up a number of ambiguities associated with a Basin that has proven to be a focal point for the world’s major E&P players.
The Canberra-based company said that in 2012 the United States Geological Society had estimated that the Guyana Suriname basin contains 26,000 MMBO of technically recoverable oil.
“This makes for the third-most prospective basin in the South American and Caribbean region, the eighth largest in the world,” Frogtech said in a media release.
However, while exploration activity and data acquisition had ramped-up in recent years, results to date were a “mixed bag of world-class discoveries and non-commercial finds”.
“For E&P companies approaching this undeveloped Basin, the geology is not well understood and the exploration risk is high,” Frogtech said.
“Uncertainty remains around the formation of the Basin; the tectonic events and phases that opened the container, influenced the stratigraphy and deformed it thereafter – how many tectonic events were there in the Jurassic? What is the composition of the basement and how that has influenced the structure of the Basin, the location of depocentres for reservoir and source, and the heat-flow from the basement for maturing the hydrocarbons?”
Nevertheless, Frogtech said these questions and concerns can be addressed by its Guyana Suriname SEEBASE® Study & GIS, which its team of geoscientists and GIS experts had used to develop integrated and interpreted public domain geological and geophysical data for a new model for the evolution, depth-to-basement structure and derived properties of the Basin.
“In a modernisation of current models, the new Frogtech study proposes that four tectonic phases during the Late Triassic and Jurassic periods formed the Basin with extension beginning approximately 50 Ma earlier than previously thought. This proposes the previously unrealised presence of Early Jurassic source rock in the distal, deep-water part of the basin, analogous to the stratigraphy of the proximal, onshore areas of the Basin,” Frogtech said.
Included in the study is a new tectonic reconstruction to the support Frogtech model. Eight plate reconstructions using newly revised basement terrane interpretations show the relative position of the Guyana-Suriname Basin at the ultimate tip of the propagating Central Atlantic.
Frogtech said the “predictive nature of the study into how the basement topography in the deep-water areas of the basin play an important role in localising the position of basin floor flans, much sought after as potential reservoir rocks. The study includes basement and sediment thickness maps which, together with plate reconstructions, better predict the deposition of source rocks associated with the rift and early post-rift phases in both Jurassic and Cretaceous time”.
