Hydrocarbon potential of a multi-client 3D – Bonaparte Gulf, Offshore Australia

Overview

Our client is an international multi-client seismic company who had acquired and processed the 2013 Kyranis 3D seismic survey located in the Bonaparte Gulf, Offshore Australia. RISC was asked to evaluate the hydrocarbon potential of the acreage covered by the 3D survey.

Challenge

The client was having great difficulty selling the survey to potential clients since they had very little understanding of the hydrocarbon play types in the study area and were unable to evaluate the prospectivity of the seismic data that they had acquired.

Our challenge was to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the area in a very short time frame and fully demonstrate all the different plays and prospects with an emphasis on developing any new plays or showing commercially large prospects.

Approach

Our approach was to draw on our deep geological knowledge of the study area and use state of the art software to interpret the 3D seismic data set. The comprehensive evaluation resulted in the following:

• The new data was of excellent quality and significantly improved the imaging of the mid Jurassic target horizons
• Five Oxfordian structural leads were identified which is a new play type for the graben
• Numerous top Permian prospects were mapped with potentially commercial volumes of gas
• An extension of a known gas discovery was mapped into vacant acreage.

Outcomes

On the basis of the work provided by RISC, our client could now clearly demonstrate the value in the 3D survey and was far more confident in marketing the data.

The additional mapping of an extension to a known gas discovery was also very valuable knowledge to our client.