Play Fairway Mapping is Key in the North Sea

Regional play fairway mapping is the key to locating remaining prospectivity in the prolific North Sea hydrocarbon province, according to the new Ternan play evaluation report released by global energy services company LR Senergy.

The Ternan 2015 Integrated North Sea Report is the latest in a series of regional play fairway evaluations that analyze petroleum systems and provide exploration specialists with a unique insight into the regional risk factors that impact subsurface studies. The reports are designed for evaluation and screening of exploration opportunities. They help minimize regional risk and increase exploration success, and can be used for rapid assessment of acreage in mature, underexplored and frontier basins.

Ternan, a wholly owned subsidiary of LR Senergy, has had a long history of publishing play fairway reports, the first of which was released in 2003. This report covered the U.K. Central North Sea and was closely followed by reports on the UK Northern North Sea, the Norwegian North Sea, the U.K. Atlantic Margin and the Irish Atlantic Margin, on behalf of the Irish government. 

The 2015 Ternan report builds on the three previous North Sea studies to provide an integrated suite of play maps, incorporating recently released wells and new geological interpretations to give a comprehensive view of the remaining hydrocarbon potential of 19 North Sea plays. 

Global head of reservoir services at LR Senergy, Rob Fisher, said, “The importance of understanding how the regional geology of the North Sea relates to the petroleum system and prospectivity of a play cannot be underestimated. No other product has the same level of detail or data coverage. Mapping the North Sea as a single depositional province, by removing the barrier of the U.K./Norway median line, allows these plays to be explored with much more confidence as the maps provide an uninterrupted view of regional prospectivity across the province.”

LR Senergy’s 2015 Ternan report is based upon the interpretation of more than 2,700 released wells combined with previous work and a large volume of published data. The maps and interpretation provide the user with an analysis of the prospectivity of 19 plays spanning the Palaeozoic to the Tertiary. Report author, David Mudge, has used his 38 years’ of North Sea and North Atlantic exploration experience to provide a comprehensive analysis of this globally important hydrocarbon province.  

Dr. Mudge said, “The 2014 Wood Review called for a revitalization of regional exploration in the North Sea to ensure that both existing and new plays are explored, appraised and exploited to their full potential. Play fairway mapping, which displays the regional risk associated with individual plays, is the most effective and systematic way to locate these remaining resources. Our new report will provide the tools for companies to assess the remaining prospectivity of the large number of North Sea plays with proven hydrocarbons, and to locate new resources in areas of poorly understood geology and limited exploration.”

The Ternan report is published as a digital atlas with an accompanying well database and ArcGIS project. The digital atlas contains more than 160 maps and figures, illustrating the interpretation that builds into a complete picture of the play fairway of each of the 19 plays in the region. 

The well database is available as either an ODMTM project or MS Access database. The data can form the basis of a reference database and be merged into existing interpretations from any industry standard software package. The ArcGIS project contains over 100 maps that are also provided as georeferenced jpeg files.