Past Events › VIC / TAS

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…

An important geological risk associated with exploration in many sedimentary basins, particularly those that formed due to lithosphere extension, is the presence of igneous rocks. Whilst hydrocarbon exploration has traditionally overlooked basins containing igneous rocks, the past decade has witnessed the development of an array of new interpretative tools and workflows for characterising both intrusive and extrusive igneous rocks and related phenomena using 3D seismic data. This presentation will highlight the application of 3D seismic data to understand the plumbing…

Sedimentary rocks typically have variable inorganic geochemistry, even in apparently uniform successions. This is driven by subtle changes in mineralogy, often associated with accessory phases such as heavy minerals, but also by the type and abundance of framework grains (lithics and feldspars for example). Chemostratigraphy is based on the characterisation of sedimentary rocks using elemental data (bulk-rock inorganic geochemistry) to detect these changes. Discrete packages of sediment are identified based on geochemical trends and these are then correlated across wells.…