Print this pageResource Assessment of 13 Untapped Oil and Gas Discoveries Offshore Nova Scotia
Since 2000, 1.5 Tcf (trillion cubic ft) of gas has been produced from Jurassic and Cretaceous aged sandstone reservoirs in five fields on the Scotian Shelf offshore Nova Scotia, Canada. Next year in 2010, a new development project will add 200 Mcf (million cubic feet) per day of gas production from a Jurassic carbonate reef front reservoir. Current infrastructure includes five production platforms connected by subsea flowlines, a 208 km subsea production gathering pipeline leading to an onshore gas processing plant, and an onshore pipeline that transports sales gas to the north eastern United States. An additional production platform and 170 km subsea pipeline will be completed next year.
There are currently 13 oil and gas discoveries that have been declared Significant Discoveries under existing legislation, but have never been put on production. Considering the increased presence of production infrastructure and availability of improved seismic data, a project was undertaken to determine if any of these discoveries could be commercially viable.
With the notable exception of the carbonate bank field, all Significant Discoveries on the Scotian Shelf resulted from exploration drilling conducted between 1969 and 1988. This exploration effort, which was primarily based on 2-D seismic mapping, resulted in 21 discoveries that flow tested hydrocarbons and could therefore qualify as Significant Discoveries. In the past 18 years, 8 of these discoveries have been put on production. The last publically released resource assessment of the remaining 13 undeveloped discoveries was completed in 1997 and based on the original 2-D seismic mapping. This assessment determined that the remaining 13 Significant Discoveries contained 2.3 Tcf recoverable gas. The largest individual field was 450 Bcf (billion cubic feet).
Over the past 12 years, 3-D seismic has been acquired and used to remap these structures. Well log data has also been revaluated utilizing knowledge gained over nine years of production history. Using this new data, a reassessment of all 13 fields has been completed and an economic model has been used to evaluate the results. This talk will describe the assessment process and report on the reserves estimates and economics of these remaining 13 undeveloped Significant Discoveries.
AAPG Search and Discover Article #90100©2009 AAPG International Conference and Exhibition 15-18 November 2009, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil