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The AAPG/Datapages Combined Publications Database
Houston Geological Society Bulletin
Abstract
Abstract: The Evolving Exploration of the Subsalt Play
in the Offshore Gulf of Mexico
By
1Anadarko Petroleum Corporation
2TGS-Calibre Geophysical Company
The existence of horizontal components of salt movement with probable subsalt traps in the South Additions of the Louisiana and Texas Shelf and Slope, has only recently become commonly accepted. For several decades, hundreds of wells were drilled into salt on the outer shelf and slope of the Northwestern Gulf of Mexico. Unless drilled on the flanks of vertical salt diapirs, which themselves were probably secondary remobilizations of ancestral horizontal salt sills, these wells barely penetrated salt features that are now interpreted as laterally emplaced horizontal salt sheets. These wells all stopped far short of drilling any significant thickness of these salt sills, and certainly thousands of feet short of testing the giant petroleum potential of today's Subsalt Exploration Play, that is now emerging in the Offshore Gulf of Mexico.
Detailed displays of the horizontal
aspects of Gulf of Mexico salt tectonics
combined with subsalt drilling results
are shown using time seismic sections,
well logs, and paleobathymetry from
over 20 wells drilled through and/or
into varying thicknesses of horizontal
salt. The presence of massive subsalt
sands such as those observed in South
Marsh Island Block
200 are now well
acknowledged. Subsalt petroleum discoveries
announced in Ship Shoal
Block
349, South Timbalier
Block
200, and in
Mississippi Canyon
Block
211, demonstrate
current success and strongly encourage future exploration efforts. As
seismic image resolution continues to
improve from advanced acquisition and
processing techniques, and subsalt well
control refines geologic models and concepts, geoscientific understanding will
grow rapidly and lead to additional significant
discoveries in multiple styled
traps beneath the horizontal salt sills of
the Offshore Gulf of Mexico. Multiple
styles and areas of style dominance will
be discussed.
The evolutionary vertical remobilizations of these sills have clearly structured many of the supra-salt giant fields of the Offshore Gulf of Mexico. The 1990's may well be the Decade of Discovery for this significant petroleum potential that is hidden by the horizontal salt sills that have obscured subsalt seismic images for decades.
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