Print this pageABSTRACT: The Hydrocarbon Source Potential of Brazil and West Africa Salt Basins: A Multidisciplinary Approach
MELLO, MARCIO R., and FRANCISCO NEPOMUCENO, Petrobras Research Center, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The rapid growth of exploration in the 
Brazilian
and West African salt basins in the last decade can be attributed to the recognition by oil companies that these basins constitute some of the last frontiers in the world for appropriation of large oil and gas reserves.
With the break-up of the African and South American plates, a series of brackish to saline organic-prolific shallow hypoxianoxic water bodies were established symmetrically in both continents.
In Brazil, the presence of deep water large turbidity deposits associated with ubiquitous Neocomian organic-rich source rocks deposited in a rift-system alkaline brackish to saline water lake have provided the ideal conditions for the occurrence, in Campos basin, of giant oil accumulations. Present estimates are 29.0 billion barrels VOIP and 270 billion cubic meters of natural gas.
In the other Brazilian and West African salt basins, exploration is far from being complete, since deep water probes have not been started. However, evidence has shown that similar oil types in the southern Brazilian Santos, Campos, and Espirito Santo basins are to be found in the West African Cuanza, Cabinda, and Zaire basins. Such basins fit neatly in the jigsaw puzzle if the maps of the South American and African continents are brought together.
This work attempts to reconstruct, through a geological, geophysical, and geochemical approach, the paleoenvironment of deposition of the source rocks deposited in the Brazilian
and West African salt basins, aiming to assess, estimate and compare their hydrocarbon source potential.
AAPG Search and Discovery Article #91012©1992 AAPG Annual Meeting, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, June 22-25, 1992 (2009)