Opportunities to Add Value in the Berkine Basin?

Javier Machin¹, José María Jauregui¹, Miguel González¹, Eduardo Figari¹, and Cheriff Hellal^2
1Repsol Exploración, Madrid, Spain
²Sonatrach - Activité Amont, Boumerdes, Algeria

The Berkine Basin is located in the Eastern part of Algeria and overlies on the tectonically stable Sahara Platform. It is a pericratonic basin, which contains a total sedimentary thickness of nearly 6 km in the deepest part and extends over 350,000 km² through Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. The topography is typical of the Grand Erg Oriental, a sand dunes extension. This basin has been one of the most successful in the petroleum exploration in the Algeria country during the nineteens and even the first years of the 2000s increasing the reserves up to 10 BBMMO. In spite of the basin is getting mature and the most prominent structures have been drilled successfully, still some business opportunities can be encountered in the basin by applying new exploration technologies and the knowledge of over 30 years of exploration cases.
The development of all these huge oil accumulations present over the Berkine trend has supplied of surface facilities and pipelines to the area, reducing drastically the CAPEX and hence, the minimum economic field size until making economic prospects as small as just few km². The intense use of 3D data with the aim of searching for subtle relief traps, about 10/ 20 m closure, combined with new technologies of processing capable to recover higher frequencies, and a more fine tuned structural model has allowed to the group to reveal a new prospectivity in the area .
Under these guidelines, RepsolYPF and partners have developed an intensive drilling program in the eastern side of the Berkine basin, having found three oil accumulations capable to be put in production

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90072 © 2007 AAPG and AAPG European Region Conference, Athens, Greece