Cocarde: From Industry-Academia Partnership for the Study of Cold-Water Carbonate Reservoir Systems in Deep Environments

Jean-Pierre Henriet¹, Wolf-Christian Dullo², Anneleen Foubert³, Dierk Hebbeln⁴, Andres Rüggeberg², and David Van Rooij^1
1Renard Centre of Marine Geology, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium
²IFM-GEOMAR, Kiel, Germany
³CSTJF, TOTAL, Pau, France
⁴MARUM, Bremen, Germany

April 2005: R/V Joides Resolution sets sail to Porcupine Seabight, W of Ireland. Target: Challenger Mound, a 155 m high carbonate mound discovered in 1997 in water depths of 900 m. A continuous cold-water coral mound record of 2.5 Ma is revealed, with a weak but intriguing Deep Biosphere underneath. Some 7 years earlier, ODP Leg 182 had drilled buried cool-water ‘reefs’ in the Great Australian Bight. Bryozoan carbonate build-ups were identified as a possible analogue for Late Cretaceous-Danian mounds. May 2002: cold-water coral carbonate mounds are discovered amidst giant mud volcanoes off Morocco. Featuring a methane front a few metres below the seafloor and intriguing cycles of carbonate dissolution and precipitation, they are targeted by IODP proposal 673.

At the pace of these discoveries, a multidisciplinary pool of researchers moves forward into a world of Geosphere-Biosphere Coupling processes, which may hold the key to the early shaping of deep-water carbonate reservoirs and to the diagenetic pathways, followed as these mounds move from surface to subsurface . Developing a more lasting momentum in this reservoir science, to include advanced experiments on natural mound labs, is the ambition of COCARDE. This flexible and modular Industry-Academia consortium, teaming up with EC and ESF at the pace of their calls, builds upon 2 years operational Flag Actions to fuel a steady flux of PhD studies, boost deep-water reservoir science and breed a new generation of multidisciplinary explorers.

AAPG International Conference and Exhibition, Cape Town, South Africa 2008 © AAPG Search and Discovery