The Hydrocarbon Prospectivity of the Eastern Black Sea

Vincent, Stephen J.¹, Andrew C. Morton², Andrew Carter³, Li Guo¹, Samantha Gibbs⁴, Samuel P. Rice¹, Nada Kozman⁵ (1) University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom (2) HM Research Associates, West Midlands, United Kingdom (3) University College London - Birkbeck College, London, United Kingdom (4) University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom (5) Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom

The Eastern Black Sea is one of the few remaining frontier basins within southwest Asia. It shares many similarities with the South Caspian Basin: a prolific (Maykopian) source rock, a thick Tertiary sedimentary pile and basement consisting of oceanic crust of poorly constrained age. Exploration models, in part, have also been imported from the South Caspian Basin, with large volumes of quartz-rich Russian Platform-sourced sediments postulated to have been delivered to the basin via a palaeo-Volga River equivalent, the palaeo-Don. Unlike in the South Caspian, however, the Greater Caucasus, Europe's highest mountain chain, currently forms a significant obstacle to such sediment dispersal systems entering into the Eastern Black Sea, with them being deflected around its western tip. This paper will review the available field evidence for the timing of Western Greater Caucasus uplift and will discuss the implications these have on the potential for Tertiary reservoir-quality sandstones being present within the basin. Alternative, Upper Jurassic carbonate reservoir systems will also be discussed along with other key elements of the Eastern Black Sea petroleum system.