Geophysical appraisal for the sandy levels within Abu Roash C and E members in Abu Gharadig Field, Western Desert, Egypt

Mohammad Abdelfattah Sarhan

doi:10.1007/s13202-021-01107-3

Abstract

The present work concerns with the geophysical assessment for the sandstones of Abu Roash C and E members for being potential hydrocarbon reservoirs at Abu Gharadig Field, Western Desert, Egypt. The analysis of seismic data covers Abu Gharadig Field showing ENE–WSW anticline fragmented by NW–SE normal faults. The presence of these structures is due to the dextral wrench corridor that extensively deformed the north area of the Western Desert within Late Cretaceous episode. The examination of well-log data of Abu Gharadig-6 Well revealed that the favourable zone locates between depths 9665–9700 ft (zone I) within Abu Roash “C” Member. The second promising zone in Abu Gharadig-15 Well occurs between depths 9962–9973 ft (zone II) in Abu Roash “E” Member. The quantitative evaluation indicated that zone I has better reservoir quality than zone II since it is characterised by low shale volume (0.01), high effective porosity (0.22), low water saturation (0.14), low bulk volume of water (0.03), higher values of absolute permeability (113 mD), high relative permeability to oil and low water cut, whereas zone II has 0.13 shale volume, 0.16 effective porosity, 0.39 water saturation, 0.06 bulk volume of water, lower values of absolute permeability (27 mD), low relative permeability to oil and relatively high water cut. The obtained results recommended that the drilling efforts should be focused on the sandy levels within Abu Roash C Member (1st priority) and the sand levels within Abu Roash E Member (2nd priority) in Abu Gharadig Basin and its surroundings.

Highlights

Abu Gharadig Basin (AG Basin) is the largest sedimentary basin in the northern Western Desert of Egypt (Fig. 1)
AG Basin has attracted the attention of several geoscientists (e.g. Abd El Aal 1988; El Sayed et al 1993; El Diasty and Moldowan 2012; Sarhan 2017a,b,c, 2020; Barakat and Nooh 2017; Sarhan and Collier 2018; Hewaidy et al 2018; Elmahdy et al 2020; ElBagoury 2020)
The structure map for the examined surface displays asymmetrical anticline strikes ENE–WSW and plunges to NE (Fig. 8). This anticlinal fold fragmented by abundant NW–SE extensional faults varies in length between 5 and 12 km (Fig. 8)

Summary

Introduction

Abu Gharadig Basin (AG Basin) is the largest sedimentary basin in the northern Western Desert of Egypt (Fig. 1). It is an intra-cratonic E-W rift basin of approximately 330 km long and 50 to 75 km wide (El Gazzar et al 2016). Abu El Naga 1984; Dolson et al 2001; Moustafa 2008) These traps show three- or four-way structural closures in addition to the fault block structures mostly the NE-SW and NW–SE faults (Abd El Aal 1988; Sultan and Abd El Halim 1988)

Objectives

Results

Conclusion