Past Events › VIC / TAS

Some oil and gas fields (e.g., Pluto/Wheatstone), and many yet to be found fields, lie beneath areas where the sea-floor bathymetry changes rapidly. This has caused nightmares for many seismic processors since the 1990s and still causes problems for seismic interpreters today. Some new seismic processing and acquisition technologies offer potential solutions but probably not without substantial geological input into the velocity model building. In fact, there’s even more to the problem than just geology! An understanding of carbonate rock…

Although still one of Australia’s most prolific hydrocarbon provinces, the Gippsland Basin is an enigma. The basin largely owes it success to a single play (top porosity below regional seal), reflected in an anomalous creaming curve that shows no kick in production due to common ‘step-change’ events such as the application of 3D seismic or exploration of the deep water. It is believed the explanation can be found in depth imaging issues, which have neem known in the basin for…

The Pluto 4D Project is Australia’s first 4D acquired over a gas field and has been an outstanding success despite the prior high technical risk of not being able to detect 4D signals above the background noise.  At the time the first 4D Monitor Survey was acquired the Pluto field had been online for 3 years 9 months and produced approximately 1 Tcf of gas.   4D feasibility studies carried out previously showed that saturation changes (related to water ingress)…

Managing uncertainties in our oil and gas exploration business goes well beyond technical analyses. The intent of this paper is to show how factors outside the technical effort can affect the outcome of exploration campaigns. Predictions made by teams affect investment decisions but how this analysis is conveyed to other stakeholders has a significant impact on exploration decisions and hence the outcomes of  programs. All of us involved in the exploration effort including those outside the team have to have…

1D (maturity) modeling provides a unique and excellent opportunity to integrate concepts from different branches of geoscience, and to analyze geologic histories in new and valuable ways. The improved understanding of fundamental geological processes and relationships that emerges from such efforts can sometimes lead to new exploration concepts, and become the foundation and source for new plays. Within this general field, one topic of particular interest, the focus of this presentation, is the relative importance of eustasy versus tectonics in…

Prior to 2014, the Mauritania-Senegal-Guinea Bissau-Conakry (MSGBC) Basin was largely viewed as a petroleum backwater with low levels of drilling activity. There had not been an offshore well in Senegal for 35 years and there had never been a deep water well. This changed abruptly with large oil discoveries in offshore Senegal at FAN-1 and SNE-1, SNE being the largest oil discovery in the world for 2014. Successful appraisal of SNE has more than doubled the volume estimates and further…

This year marks the 50th anniversary of oil and gas production from the Gippsland Basin Joint Venture. In a few short years pioneering explorers back in the 1960s discovered many of Australia’s largest oil and gas deposits off Victoria’s Gippsland coast. Join Richard Owen from ExxonMobil for a discussion on how our nation’s economy, and whole generation – including himself – grew up on the benefits delivered by that exploration campaign, and the importance of ongoing oil and gas exploration…