Major 'Caribbean plate' survey by Moscow-based consortium 'Geology Without Limits' to commence soon, will bring together leading scientists from around the world.
This story, whose outcome was an important milestone for Total’s exploration at the time of discovery, can be seen as complementary to the Mahakam success story, described in the September 2011 Historical Highlights column.
Long captivated by both the onshore and offshore possibilities in Colombia, operators are hoping to turn Caribbean potential into reality soon.
Latin America offers some of the most promising and most perplexing exploration prospects on the planet.
The Santos and Campos basins continue to be the world's hottest spot in deepwater and ultra-deepwater exploration.
The upcoming 2013 International Conference and Exhibition (ICE) in Cartegena, Colombia, will be an event you don't want to miss.
Prolific hydrocarbon discoveries in the subsalt, commonly known as the “presalt,” section of Brazil and the conjugate African margin have created a business imperative to predict reservoir quality in lacustrine carbonates. Geothermal convection is a style of groundwater flow known to occur in rift settings, which is capable of diagenetic modification of reservoir quality. We simulated variable density groundwater flow coupled with chemical reactions to evaluate the potential for diagenesis driven by convection in subsalt carbonates. Rates of calcite diagenesis are critically controlled by temperature gradient and fluid flux following the principles of retrograde solubility. Simulations predict that convection could operate in rift carbonates prior to salt deposition, but with rates of dissolution in the reservoir interval only on the order of 0.01 vol. %/m.y., which is too low to significantly modify reservoir quality. The exception is around permeable fault zones and/or unconformities where flow is focused and dissolution rates are amplified to 1 to 10 vol. %/m.y. and could locally modify reservoir quality. After salt deposition, simulations also predict convection with a critical function for salt rugosity. The greatest potential for dissolution at rates of 0.1 to 1 vol. %/m.y. occurs where salt welds, overlying permeable carbonates thin to 500 m (1640 ft) or less. With tens of million years residence times feasible, convection under these conditions could locally result in reservoir sweet spots with porosity modification of 1% to 10% and potentially an order of magnitude or more in reservoir permeability. Integrating quantitative model–derived predictive diagenetic concepts with traditional subsurface data sets refines exploration to production scale risking of carbonate reservoir presence and quality.
The last decade has been good for Latin America.
Were there enough arguments to champion a firm stand for a Pacific origin of the Caribbean lithosphere, as Kevin Burke, Bruce Malfait and others had suggested?
Geoscience students from the University of Utah took the top prize in this year’s AAPG/AAPG Foundation Imperial Barrel Award competition, beating out 10 other teams from geoscience departments from around the world.
This 18-chapter volume is small enough to focus on the interplay among tectonics, sedimentation, and petroleum systems. Yet it is big enough to cover the diversity of structural styles in important petroliferous sedimentary basins around the globe. Product #1174. Price: Member $174 / List $174.
This Memoir is critical for exploration geoscientists in the petroleum industry, research institutions, and academia in order to understand the diverse petroleum systems, the tectonic and geologic evolution of sedimentary basins, and the development of hydrocarbon fields in these regions of South America. Product #1303. Price: Member $131 / List $262.
The volume documents shale tectonics from a variety of basins around the world, including the southern Beaufort Sea; the Krishna-Godavari Basin, India; the Niger Delta; eastern offshore Trinidad; offshore Brunei; and along the Spanish arm of the Mediterranean Sea. Product #1023. Price: Member $99/List $139
This volume will prove useful to anyone interested in the methods for observing and quantifying the pore systems that control hydrocarbon storage and flow in unconventional reservoirs. (Product #1281. Member price $144 / List price $339.)