Additional Wildcat Exploration targets in the Deeper Pre-Cambrian Basement Complex of Gulf of Suez and North Red Sea Region, Egypt

By

 Fadel Awny¹, Mohamed Saleh¹, Adel Amin¹

(1) Gebel El Zeit Petroleum Company (PetroZeit), Cairo, Egypt

 The authors in this paper believe that there is a potential geologic chance, to be highly considered by petroleum explorationists, for petroleum to be migrated and trapped in the unexplored, deeper, (highly fractured, highly altered, possibly layered, faulted and folded) older Precambrian basement complex system. This is likely as a stand-alone petroleum trapping system, apart from the Miocene and pre-Miocene sedimentary system, or combined. There are four main assemblages, which constitute nearly all of the Precambrian basement complex section in the Northeastern Desert. These are (1) Hammamat Formation (2) Dokhan Volcanics (3) Dikes and (4) Plutonic granite and granodiorite. Southward, across a major structural discontinuity trending southwest, the basement is very different and is characterized by the presence of ophilitic ultramafics and banded Fe-formation, and southwest trending shears. The basement masses, in the adjacent surface outcrops (Gebel El Zeit, Ush El Malaha, Araba-Durba .... etc) and subsurface are generally extensively fractured. The exposed fracture systems are mainly arranged in two perpendicular sets oriented in northeast varying trends. Some fractures are characterized by steep to vertical inclination, others are gently dipping and some are subhorizontal. Petroleum was discovered and produced from the top 300 to 400 meter of the fractured basement complex reservoir system (egs. Zeit Bay, Geisum, Ashrafi, Magaweesh,..... etc Oil Fields). Last, but not least, not all the above mentioned basement complex sequences were reached or drilled, accordingly the authors recommend to drill a parametric well to test the footwall block of one of these mountain range blocks (e.g. Gebel El Zeit, Nazazat - Ekma, Araba-Durba, ... etc).