Abstract

The era of easy to find hydrocarbon from conventional traps are gone and thus the present thrust of hydrocarbon exploration are mainly in the frontier areas, specifically in the deep waters. But the uncertainties involved for various components of petroleum system (e.g. reservoir, charge, trap, source rock etc) makes it difficult to assess because of wide variability of these components especially in rank exploratory deepwater areas. This paper presents a few case studies for assessing the petroleum system components in deepwater areas. Out of the seven cases, three case studies will discuss the reservoir uncertainty, two will highlight the generation/charging uncertainty of deep water reservoirs and one is on seismic imaging uncertainty for structural definition. The last case study will discuss about a DHI signature.