World's Largest Seep Hunt Ramps Up

Geotechnical service provider Fugro is ramping up operations at the world’s largest offshore hydrocarbon seep survey being conducted in the Gulf of Mexico. The survey, planned to cover an area of approximately 625,000 square kilometers (240,000 square miles), is being carried out for Norwegian survey company TGS as part of its industry-funded, multi-client Gigante Survey.

With the 18-month project, TGS aims to create the most comprehensive and newest continuous offshore Mexico dataset, timed to coincide with denationalization of Mexico’s oil and gas market, which began in 2014 after a period of seven decades of government control by state-owned Pemex. The survey is designed to assist exploration and production companies in their evaluation of prospects offshore Mexico during forthcoming Deep Water Bid Round scheduled for December 5, 2016.

This week, Fugro deployed multi-purpose offshore survey vessel Fugro Gauss to join the Fugro Brasilis on the project. Both vessels are using hull-mounted multibeam echosounders (12 kHz and 30 kHz respectively) and sub-bottom profiler systems to map an area of approximately 625,000 square kilometers in the deep waters of Mexico. 

In May, TGS announced that it had acquired approximately 141,000 kilometers (75 percent) of the planned 186,000 kilometer 2D seismic data for Gigante. Preliminary data results have identified a number of prospective play fairways within a variety of structural provinces. 

The acquisition of multibeam data is over 30 percent complete with preliminary results available. This data will direct TGS' seafloor coring operations which began on January 22. Coring in the Perdido area is now complete. Seafloor core samples will be analyzed to determine hydrocarbon grade and will be combined with TGS' other geoscience data as part of a comprehensive interpretative study of the region.