Deep-Water Sequence Stratigraphy and Exploration Plays in a Frontier Basin: Offshore Tanzania and Mozambique

摘要

Recent discoveries in offshore Tanzania and Mozambique highlight East Africa as an emerging world-class petroleum province. Estimates for this province total 12.5 BBO and 250 TCF of gas (Brownfield et al., 2012) as yet undiscovered hydrocarbons. Play-opening reservoir systems have been verified in Paleocene, Eocene, and at least two Oligocene deep water submarine fan and intra-slope channel complexes (Law, 2011). Evidence continues to mount suggesting that the Late Cretaceous section may also contain deposits from similar depositional settings (TPDC, 2003). There are indications that the petroleum system may contain oil as well as the established gas, and investigations are underway to determine if liquids are also present in the deep water areas. In short, the petroleum system components are all verified, what remains is the need to rapidly high grade what constitutes an enormous play area (> 0.5 million square kilometers) by establishing the extent and distribution of the deepwater reservoir systems. Therefore a strong impetus exists to develop techniques for high grading the area which can be performed on 2D regional (seismic-) data. One such technique is presented in this paper. It involves generating high-resolution horizon interpretations from the 2D seismic data. It enables not only the transforming of 2D seismic data into Wheeler (chronostratigraphic) domain (Ligtenberg et al., 2006; de Groot et al., 2010; Qayyum et al., 2012) but also helps in mapping depositional shifts and reservoir distribution.