Producibility of Turbidite Reservoirs - A Comparison of the North Sea and Gulf of Mexico

Much of the focus of current hydrocarbon exploration is in frontier areas of the world where deepwater clastic reservoirs are expected to be found. Exploration for these reservoirs has recently been conducted in areas such as West Africa, the Gulf of Mexico and the West of Shetlands where major accumulations have been found. However, deepwater clastic reservoirs are architecturally complex, making the process of appraising new discoveries a difficult balance between understanding the reservoirs and minimizing the number of expensive appraisal wells. It is therefore increasingly important to understand the lessons that can be learned from analogue fields and reservoirs. It is these analogues that provide us with a range of uncertainty for producibility and performance in architecturally different reservoirs such as sheet sands, channels and levees.