This week, PGS released the first data from its new Pacific MegaProject, providing E&P companies with an excellent opportunity to evaluate prospectivity across Colombia's Tumaco and San Juan basins.

Modern processing techniques have been applied to reprocess all available data in the target area, including several vintages. The result is a single unified and rejuvenated MegaProject dataset, which provides new insights into potential petroleum system elements, including features that may be indicative of potential hydrocarbon-bearing traps.

Releasing Regional Understanding

MegaProjects are merged, post-stack datasets consisting of multiple 2D and 3D surveys that have been matched and merged to produce a phase-balanced and uniformly scaled contiguous regional volume.

The regional coverage provided by MegaProject data supports the understanding of tectonic and stratigraphic evolution across entire basins. Regional understanding leads to a robust understanding of existing and potential petroleum systems.

Geology and Prospectivity

The Colombia MegaProject covers most of the Tumaco and San Juan Basins. This area is characterized by a forearc basin structural style in convergent margins, relating to the subduction of the Nazca Plate beneath the western part of South America. Along the Colombia pacific margin, thick Cenozoic sedimentary sequences have accumulated over blocks of transitional and oceanic-crust basement that accreted between the Late Cretaceous and Early Cenozoic. Overlying sedimentary fill is predominantly Tertiary in age.

The potential petroleum system is related to source rocks of the late Cretaceous and early Tertiary age, migrated to turbidite fan systems associated with the Miocene interval. Trap and seal are provided by Middle-Upper Miocene shales combined with early-Middle Miocene mud.

“These basins have significant exploration potential, and the new PGS MegaProject dataset has been produced in response to renewed interest in this area,” says Sharon Walker, Vice President of Sales NSA at PGS.