PGS South Africa Survey Success

A new PGS MultiClient survey of a 13,000 line km in the frontier area offshore East Coast South Africa is making excellent progress.

Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS), through an agreement with the Petroleum Agency of South Africa, is acquiring approximately 13,000 km MultiClient 2D GeoStreamer® survey covering East Coast basins. The acquisition program is ahead of schedule (approaching 70% complete to date) and has successfully surmounted the many challenges of the area, including strong currents.

The data will give an approximate 20 km x 20 km grid of high-quality seismic over this frontier area and includes well-ties into the shallower waters in the south-west and north-east areas. This is the first comprehensive data-set to be acquired over these blocks.

The eastern coast of South Africa is a narrow passive margin that formed in Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous times, during the breakup of Gondwana. A series of en-echelon rift basins, formed during the breakup along the southern coast and known as the Outeniqua Basin, contain several commercial oil and gas fields in Early Cretaceous sands. This basic structure and a working petroleum system are predicted to continue along the eastern coast, overlain by Cenozoic sediments.

The plays expected along the East Coast of South Africa are very similar to those on the conjugate Falklands North and South Basins, where recent discoveries such as Sea Lion and Loligo have proved working petroleum systems. DSDP drilling in the 1970’s on the Maurice Ewing Bank, to the east of the Falklands, also proved the existence of Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous oil quality source rocks.

Key play types along the East Coast Basin are expected to include: Syn and post-rift Late Cretaceous deep-marine sands; Pre to early syn-rift lacustrine sands; Cenozoic deep-marine sands; and possibly fractured basement.

Acquisition of the deepwater MultiClient 2D GeoStreamer survey offshore South Africa is expected to be complete in Q2 2014 with fully processed data available in Q4 2014.