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Geoscience Suite Accelerates New Ventures and Exploration Workflows

Paris, France | Jun 12, 2018

Access to Integrated Family of Tools and Databases Give Exploration Teams Competitive Edge

The Robertson name has been synonymous with exploration-focused geological studies and data for over 50 years, providing unrivalled worldwide insight into play- and basin-scale petroleum geology.

As the benefits of digitalization become apparent across the E&P industry, CGG GeoConsulting has taken the opportunity to digitally transform its geological library. A result of this is the Robertson New Ventures Suite, an integrated family of geoscience tools and databases that offer clients a competitive edge in global new ventures screening and frontier exploration.

The six core products of the Robertson New Ventures Suite are Basins & Plays, Geochemistry, Plate Kinematics, Predictions, Provenance and Analogues. Built on the trusted brands of Tellus, Frogi, Plate Wizard, Merlin+, ProvBase and ERGO, the digitally transformed products have been integrated and renamed as part of the GeoVerse™ program that is providing a common architecture and taxonomy across the New Ventures Suite.

Besides the quantity and quality of the data, what makes the Robertson New Ventures Suite particularly powerful is its interoperability and integration that supports a broad range of exploration workflows. This allows Explorationists to easily interrogate one the industry’s richest sources of geoscience data to make quicker and better-informed decisions.

If we take an example of a frontier area of current interest, the offshore portion of the Doukkala Basin in North West Morocco, we can see how the Robertson New Ventures Suite helps to de-risk exploration. The basin is underexplored with limited offshore wells, but onshore wells have found oil and gas in Cretaceous reservoirs charged by a probable Lower Jurassic source rock. So how can we fill the offshore data gap to make a well-informed exploration decision?

We begin with Robertson Plate Kinematics, which provides a deformable plate reconstruction model to correctly identify the paleo-location for the Doukkala Basin and place control data in their correct paleo-locations. Robertson Predictions, a global paleogeographic/Earth systems modeling tool, is then used to evaluate whether the Lower Jurassic source rock is present offshore in the absence of well data and even assess its potential quality. Using this data-constrained modeling platform enables the prediction of the deposition and preservation of source rock. The model shows high organic content and a high potential for organic matter preservation due to predicted seafloor conditions.

Quickly linking to the Robertson Geochemistry database provides support for this prediction with data samples from a deep sea drilling program well sitting at the deep offshore margin of the basin recording a total organic carbon (TOC) measurement of 2.8% for the Lower Jurassic. So we now have a high degree of confidence in the presence of our potential source rock.

We then move into Robertson Basins & Plays, a play fairway and petroleum systems database, to look at the context for the maturity of the source rock. With its consistent regional stratigraphic framework and depositional history, we are able to explore 1D basin modeling and verify that the Lower Jurassic is mature in the offshore part of the basin. In fact, the source kitchen is likely to extend beyond the nominal basin boundary into the deeper offshore as well.

To develop our understanding of reservoir risk we can develop a source-to-sink understanding of sediment supply, making use of the dynamic paleo-Earth systems data in Predictions and exploring uncertainty in sediment routing using the Robertson Provenance tool. Understanding potential reservoir volumes and geometries in frontier areas often relies on analogue data, and the comprehensive database in Robertson Analogues provides a basis for reservoir de-risking.

Together with CGG’s library of over 650 Robertson Studies (Red Books), the Robertson New Ventures Suite complements CGG’s extensive multi-client offering that includes Seep Explorer, comprehensive gravity and magnetics database, integrated JumpStart™ geoscience packages and extensive high-end library of seismic data, all of which can be found @geostore.cgg.com.

Visit CGG at EAGE at booth #1640 on Tuesday at 4pm for Happy Hour to learn more about the Robertson New Ventures Suite and our case study.

(As published in the EAGE Daily News)