Papua New Guinea explorers eye deepwater play in Coral Sea

摘要

Papua New Guinea has a well established oil and gas production region in the Highlands area of the country. The commercial fields are largely restricted to a narrow fairway of Jurassic age clastic reservoirs in the Papuan basin. The deposits are mainly gas-condensate with some oil-only fields, and current known gas and liquids in place total 30.5 tcf and 1.247 billion bbl. The deep water, steep slope, and the proximity of oceanic crust, ophiolites, high-grade metamorphics, and the surface have previously been used to downgrade the prospectivity of the region to zero. There are some affinities with the Papuan Highlands fields, geology as well as onshore Australian Jurassic intracratonic basins in the pre-Coral Sea rift section, luckily as this contains the Mesozoic petroleum system. The challenge is to identify and confirm the petroleum system, and reports of oil seeps onshore in PPL 330 indicate that such a system does exist.