Significance of Surface Lineaments for Gas and Oil Exploration in Part of Sabatayn Basin-Yemen

Abstract

Sabatayn basin is one of the two mature basins producing oil and gas in Yemen. Due to the recent decline in oilproduction, the exploration activities have been extensively concentrated mainly on these two basins (Sabataynand Sayun-Masilah). So, this present study has been conducted to evaluate the exploration potential of theremaining trap areas within these mature basins. Fracture basement of reservoir becomes very attractiveexploration target in Yemen recently, after the recent discoveries of basement fracture oil fields. As theevaluation of basement traps needs time and fund, to reduce the same, this research study uses a new techniquewhich was devised with the help of Geoinformatics by analyzing the surface and subsurface lineamentseffectively. In this study, a satellite image Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+7) based analysis was conductedfor extracting surface lineaments, and for the subsurface lineaments, the basement lineaments were extractedfrom seismic, magnetic and gravity data. An orientation analysis of these surface and subsurface linear featureswas performed to detect the basic structural grains of the study area. The correlation between these structuralgrains and subsurface oil and gas traps was performed to understand the connectivity to the reservoirs. Thispaper discusses in detail about the same and the importance of using surface and subsurface lineament analysisfor delineating hydrocarbon reservoirs in the study area.