--> Hinterland Screening: the First Step Toward a Fully Integrated Source-to-Sink Understanding

AAPG ACE 2018

Datapages, Inc.Print this page

Hinterland Screening: the First Step Toward a Fully Integrated Source-to-Sink Understanding

Abstract

Despite the subsurface risk mitigation benefits of source-to-sink studies, particularly with respect to predicting reservoir distribution and quality, such studies are not routinely performed within the typical hydrocarbon exploration workflow. Often time-consuming and encompassing a large array of specialist disciplines and unstructured data, the challenge remains of how to instil a more source-to-sink focused mind-set during exploration.

Robust, data constrained, plate tectonic models provide a fundamental framework for building paleo digital elevation models (PDEMs) and testing regional source-to-sink relationships. The application of flow routing algorithms to PDEMs combined with sedimentary provenance analysis from detrital/hinterland geochronology allow the physical limits of paleo-drainage basins to be reconstructed. Assessment of the nature and composition of the hinterland within individual paleo-drainage basins, particularly within the regions of a paleo-rivers maximum erosional potential, provides a useful means for predicting sediment quality in associated point-sourced depocentres along a margin. For example, the erosion of hinterlands with markedly different compositions can have dramatic effects on the reservoir potential of surrounding basins.

Empirical scaling relationships and more general predictive models, based on present day drainage systems, can also be used to make semi-quantitative predictions regarding key parameters in ancient systems, such as sediment flux and deep marine fan volumes. The addition of thermochronology data dynamically relates periods of hinterland uplift with high sedimentation rates in the sink. Finally, an appreciation of regional climatic conditions during sediment generation can have significant implications on source-to-sink model predictions.

Discovery of several significant hydrocarbon fields along the Atlantic margins have been followed by a series of expensive failures throughout the last decade associated with reservoir quality/presence. Case studies are discussed demonstrating how effective approaches can be integrated to rapidly reconstruct first-pass source-to-sink relationships, providing robust and intuitive predictive frameworks to be readily interrogated by the petroleum geologist to help reduce exploration risk.