The Barents Sea Goliath Discovery

Jan Seldal and J. Leutscher
ENI Norge, Stavanger, Norway

The purpose of this talk is to show that questioning of an established understanding of fluid flow and burial history within a basin can create an alternative and successful play concept. The talk will also demonstrate the challenges of delineation of a prolific structure. The Eni operated Goliat discovery is situated offshore northern Norway in the Hammerfest Basin, Southwestern Barents Sea. The discovery is on a large roll-over anticline, the Goliat structure, on the southeastern margin of the Hammerfest Basin. The apex of the roll-over has less than 700m of Cretaceous and Cenozoic overburden. The Goliat structure, which has four way closures in 1km thick strata from Upper Mesozoic into Upper Paleozoic, is subdivided into several fault compartments. Up to 1995, following drilling of almost 50 wells, several gas discoveries and some minor oil discoveries had been found in the Hammerfest Basin. A common assumption among the companies was that, due to the recent uplift, gas expansion had displaced most of the oil accumulations and only gas was left behind. However Eni drew attention to a shallow giant (Goliat) structure on the basin margin. The play concept was then: could some of the displaced oil from the major structures in the basin have been captured in this shallow giant? While the first two Goliat wells discovered oil in the uppermost Triassic, the next four wells proved in addition oil and gas accumulations in Upper, Middle and Lower Triassic. The success of Goliat is a combination of questioning an established explanation of the hydrocarbon system, compiling all available regional data in a basin and using high resolution 3D seismic. The licensees in Production License 229 and Goliat are: Eni Norge (op. 65%), Statoil (20%) and DNO (15%).

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