Ecopetrol's approach to appraise risks associated to the Petroleum System Elements in Offshore Exploration in Colombia

Colombian offshore Caribbean is a classical exploratory frontier, with available information in the level of more than 60000 km of 2D and 15000 km2 of 3D seismic, and a total of less than 40 wildcat wells. In fact, only one drilling location in recent years (Araza-1) has taken advantage of new millennium seismic vintages that include the total of 3D data and that amount up to 15000 km of 2D seismic. During the past decade, Ecopetrol and its partners has acquired, interpreted and analyzed data to systematically understand and lower the uncertainties related to basin evolution and every element and process of each petroleum system in the region. Regarding source rock, Ecopetrol and other offshore operators have acquired several campaigns of piston coring, oil slick and high resolution geochemistry. All these data allowed us to support the presence of several petroleum systems active in the Caribbean Basin, with strong contribution of thermogenic hydrocarbons, and strong evidences oil prone potential. After in-house paleogeographic analyses, 3D seismic geomorphology interpretation and seismic attributes have been integrated, reservoir and seal sedimentary facies are now better understood Trap subsurface characterization and interpretation have benefitted from improved mapping of 2D and 3D seismic, and imaging of stratigraphic trap is evolving as more resolution is available from modern seimic acquisition parameters. Basin evolution and burial history are now regularly modeled and simulated in 2D and 3D dimensions, allowing migration and timing processes to be better constrained. With this approach, the several plays identified in the basin, both structural and stratigraphic, are more robustly supported, allowing Ecopetrol and its partners to commit to expensive deep water drilling campaigns from 2012 to 2015.