oa Deepwater West Coast India - Pre-Basalt and Other Mesozoic Petroleum Plays

To date, the main deep (>400m water depth) offshore exploration efforts offshore India has<br>concentrated on the East Coast where a number of large discoveries have recently been made in the<br>Krishna Godvari and other basins.<br>Now attention is turning to the deep offshore area of the West Coast of India where outside the<br>petroliferous (shallow water) province of the Mumbai High, exploration to date has been frontier in<br>nature with very few wells drilled.<br>Using recently re-processed seismic data (from a 12,000 km regional 2D seismic survey collected for<br>the DGH in 2002) we show how the application of modern seismic techniques (Radon Demultipe, PSTM<br>and PSDM) has upgraded the petroleum potential of the area - showing plays both in the Tertiary and<br>in the deeper Mesozoic section where a potential petroleum province can now be recognised below the<br>Deccan basalts. Our interpretation of this dataset shows that this Mesozoic province extends over<br>200km offshore and into waterdepths of up to 3500m - covering a large number of open blocks in<br>Indian territorial waters.<br>The paper draws on the geology of wells drilled in the Seychelles (and also refers to those in the Kutch<br>Graben) in order to build up a stratigraphic framework for the Mesozoic off the West Coast of India. It<br>is illustrated with numerous seismic examples (including data in depth)showing the petroleum potential<br>of the Mesozoic.