First Published: GEO ExPro, February 2019
Abstract
Frontier exploration in an underexplored basin should always start with a single demand: “Show me the source rock”. In the double foredeep of the eastern Black Sea the first dense grid of multi-client data available in Turkish waters reveals the world-class Maykop source rock, up to 2,000m thick: an AVO type 4 TOC-rich shale buried perfectly to be at peak oil. These new data also reveal untested analogues to the East Black Sea Basin Polshkov-1 oil discovery, with oil trapped in large structural and stratigraphic closures, in reservoirs provenanced from the quartz-rich sand sources of the Russian Caucasus.
New data reveals the potential for a new super basin – an accessible oil play lying within the world-class Maykop oil source.
We all sense the verisimilitude of PK Dickie’s warning against looking for new oil in old places with old ideas, which gives us two clear courses of action: either we can bring new ideas to old basins, or we can bring tried and tested ideas to new basins. Although truly new exploration plays are as rare as hen’s teeth (mostly old ideas in new basins), new ideas stream out of new seismic data as we learn how much of “what we know for sure that just ain’t so” (The Big Short, 2015).
Figure: Velocity overlay on 2018 seismic from the eastern Black Sea showing a strong velocity inversion with depth due to hydrocarbon generation in the Maykop source rock.
Whilst exploration geology has remained sitting on the sofa watching episodes of Friends on endless repeat, the advances in seismic imaging over the last 15 years, removing noise and multiples, are astonishing. So modern, long streamer, deghosted seismic data provides explorers worldwide with a practical idea-engine for old basins.
Read the full article here.