Timor Leste

To coincide with the Timor-Leste: 2nd Oil and Gas Licensing Round, Ascendience Geoscience is completing an evaluation project to deliver risk-reducing data and interpretation to address the principal risk impacting success in this highly prospective area.  

Blessed with abundant evidence of effective source rocks, productive reservoir sequences and plenty of structural traps the offshore region has enjoyed significant past success for both oil and gas. Explorers have also experienced much failure, with a high proportion of dry holes, many without an unambiguous failure mechanism, but commonly attributed to trap failure during Tertiary fault reactivation.

Critical to future success is understanding the failures to build better predictive models that can be calibrated against previous results, both success and failure. A conventional play-based exploration approach is not effective in this setting and leads to poor choices on which opportunities to mature, that will ultimately lead to more dry holes.

Considerable progress has been made towards a solution to mitigate the principal trap risk, but this is yet to be fully implemented in a thematic manner, with many methods proposed but few proven effective in well look backs.

This new study integrates industry common workflows with decades of R&D work across different disciplines to provide a holistic predictive model to more confidently identify intact traps, assess the degree of fill to produce more accurate volumetrics and aid well placement to improve the likelihood of exceeding minimum economic field size requirements.

Seismic data quality, traditionally a challenge to imaging fault-structure at target depth, has been noticeably improved in newly available reprocessing products and with advances in acquisition technologies the industry possesses the tools to finally overcome the problem holding back future success.

This product provides the first fully integrated solution, drawing on enhanced insights into the charge history of existing wells, the tectonic style and impact of current and palaeo-stress fields together with a better explanation for the observed seepage response.

Paradoxically the larger the trap, the less likely it is to have fully retained hydrocarbon fill. Future success lies in detecting smaller, but highly effective traps, capable of economic volume outcomes. These include traps that have retained partial fill and as a result well-placement becomes critical to success.

Talk to Ascendience today about accessing the key to future success in this attractive basin.