A sophisticated net erosion map of the Barents Sea has been produced by StatoilHydro using a multi-method, uncertainty-based approach.
The Arctic waters of the Barents Sea are seen as a natural growth area for the group.
However, the geological record in these waters has been complicated by several phases of regional uplift and erosion. That is especially true of the last five million years, corresponding to the Plio-Pleistocene ice age.
During the ice age, up to two kilometres of sediments were scraped off the continental shelf and deposited as a thick wedge along the western margin of the Barents Sea.
Potential reservoir and hydrocarbon source rocks have thus been buried far deeper than today, and subjected to far higher temperatures.
It is vital that these factors are taken properly into account in models for predicting the maturity of source rocks and reservoir quality by quantifying net erosion – the difference between the maximum and present burial depth of a particular stratigraphic horizon.
Previous studies have relied on various single techniques, each of which is notoriously uncertain.
StatoilHydro has therefore applied all the standard techniques to 58 exploration wells, thereby improving the accuracy of the results by combining them statistically.
Combining uncertainty ranges also provides distributions which represent the total uncertainty involved in such estimates.
The final product is the most accurate net erosion map of the area ever produced.
