What Enlightenment Can We Gain From World Conventional Oil and Gas Discovery in the 21st Century?

Abstract

In the late 90s, it is clear that the discovery of oil and gas fields and original petroleum reserves in the entire word shows a decreasing trend. Therefore, many petroleum geologists had been overwhelmingly pessimistic about the exploration prospect in the 21st Century. However, since the beginning of the 21st century, worldwide oil and gas discovery has still kept flourishing. It is probably fair to say that major oil and gas reserve growth is still from conventional discoveries, though the unconventional exploration has grew rapidly. Concept innovation pushed oil and gas discovery father, as the global demand for energy has ramped up. Before 2000, the bulk of petroleum reserves was mainly discovered in post-salt reservoirs in the Campos Basin. Important breakthroughs in postsalt were also made in the Santos Basin in 2001. However, during the next 5 years, the discovery of original petroleum reserves in the two basins showed a decreasing trend. Petrobras began focusing more on sub-salt and announced the discovery of the Tupi filed in 2006. The move into subsalt exploration did make sustaining discovery for oil and gas fields possible in the Campos Basin and Santos Basin. Technology advances opened up large swathes of the offshore to the possibility of drilling, as land-based exploration became less fruitful. The Gulf of Mexico has been only a part of the global offshore boom. Significant exploration has also taken place off the coasts of Brazil and the West Africa, Russia, Norway and Canada. Propelled by advances in drilling technology and seismic imaging and better understanding of deepwater turbidite reservoirs, major petroleum discoveries have been made in deepwater and ultra-deepwater. A complete view of risk and the perseverance in exploration are the key to giant field discoveries. Before 2006, the exploration degree was substantially low and drilling risks were too high in the Rovuma Basin. Exploration experts from the Anadarko Petroleum Corporation did much research work and located many prospects in the Rovuma Basin. Although the drilling of well Windjammer-1 and Windjammer-2 was end in a virtual halt successively because of some technological problems, they never gave up. In the end, the sidetracking horizontal well Windjammer 2ST1 encountered major discoveries in the Oligocene and Paleocene strata and the first giant gas field—Windjammer gas field was found. Since then, other petroleum corporations followed successively.

AAPG Datapages/Search and Discovery Article #90217 © 2015 International Conference & Exhibition, Melbourne, Australia, September 13-16, 2015