Tectonic Setting and Basin Evolution of West Wadi El-Rayan Concession (WWER) Western Desert, Egypt

Raffaele Buonaguro¹, Khamis Farhoud¹, Luca Feltre², Tesfaye Lakew³, and Tamer El-Daker^1
1Edison International SpA, Cairo, Egypt
²Edison SpA, Milano, Italy
³Petroleum Exploration consultant, Milano, Italy

West Wadi El-Rayan Concession (WWER) lies in a transit area between two major prolific sedimentary basins in the Western Desert of Egypt. These are Gindi basin (Eocene) on the eastern side and Abu Gharadig basin (Mesozoic) on the western side.
Structuration within WWER area was controlled by reactivation of older faults in response to Jurassic/Early Cretaceous and Late Cretaceous/Early Tertiary events that formed the Kattaniya inverted high and shaped the central part of WWER concession. Basin inversion led to severe erosion and downgrades the possibility of hydrocarbon charging from Jurassic/Cretaceous source rocks for some parts, while positive effects are expected in other parts within the concession as well.
Although WWER concession was previously explored by different operating Oil Companies, the hydrocarbon potentiality of this concession is not fully realized yet. Four wells have been drilled in this concession; three were dry holes and one with shows in L.Cenomanian.
New detailed geological and geophysical studies have been carried out using the pre-existing 2D seismic, new acquired 3D seismic and borehole data. Understanding the tectonic setting and basin evolution of WWER concession gave good results like locating potential structural closures of compressional folds and their associated reverse and normal faults in Pre-Tertiary sediments as well as predicting the reservoir facies distribution. These results revived the exploration activity in WWER.

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