Exploration in the Western Barents Sea along the continental margin has been limited with only a few wells and only one sub-commercial discovery. New geological data and an understanding of the Western Barents Sea have led to the expansion of the APA exploration area this year, announced on May 10th, motivating further exploration.
The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD) predicts that the Barents Sea contains most of the undiscovered resources that are left on the shelf.
At the upcoming NCS Exploration conference in Oslo, the session Western Barents Sea Updates will start with a joint talk by VBER and TGS showing there is potential for future prospectivity in this underexplored area.
Of particular interest is the Paleogene succession which is either not present or mudstone-dominated further east in the Barents Sea. In the west, however, wells such as 7316/5-1, 7216/11-1S, and 7218/11-1 have sandstone units either in the Eocene or Paleocene. The uplifted Stappen High is the likely Eocene sand source.
NPD together with UiT (University of Tromsø), located oil seep sites in the Barents Sea during their cruises, identified at the sea surface from multiple SAR satellite images.
Oil seeps offshore western Svalbard unexpectedly show that the oil is sourced from a source rock of Tertiary age or younger. Such a young source rock is to our knowledge not previously reported from the Barents Sea or Norwegian‐Greenland Sea areas.
This source rock is most likely matured, without being deeply buried, due to high thermal gradients around the mid‐ocean ridge, with the migration of hydrocarbons laterally up‐dip towards the Svalbard margin.
If this is a regional source rock, it can be of significance for the whole Western Barents Sea margin.
This topic will be covered in the second talk of the session by Andre Frantzen Jansen (NPD). Will we also get some updates from this year’s spring cruise, where NPD and UiT are hunting for new oil seeps in the frontier Western Barents Sea area?
The last talk of the session will be by Professor Carita Augustsson from the University of Stavanger. She will present a case study on how the depositional environment plays a crucial role in determining the final reservoir quality in Lower Cretaceous sandstone reservoirs in the Southwestern Barents Sea. The factors affecting the porosity evolution of these reservoirs will be demonstrated.
Interesting times ahead of us – explore new acreage and possibilities in WBS – stay updated and join the NCS Exploration conference in Oslo!