Giant and major-size oil and gas fields worldwide in basement reservoirs: state-of-the-art and future prospects

Abstract

Oil and gas occurs in basement reservoirs in many parts of the world. The reserves of basement fields are as small as one or two million barrels of oil or gas-equivalent such as the Beruk Northeast pool in Sumatra, Indonesia to over 1.0 billion barrels of oil as in Viet Nam’s Bach Ho field and Libya’s Augila-Naafora field. This paper focuses on three giant-size oil and gas fields and six major-size fields. Exploration for oil and gas in basement has been remarkably successful in the past decade with important discoveries in basement in Indonesia, United Kingdom, Norway, Chad, and Argentina. In order to successfully develop basement oil and gas fields and also to avoid costly mistakes, all available geological, geophysical, reservoir engineering and economic data must be closely studied. Also, it is very important to study analogues worldwide of basement oil and gas fields in order to understand why some fields are very successful and others turn out to be technical and economic failures.