Contrasting Exploration Play Types in Brazilian Equatorial Ceara Basin: Insights from Recent Reprocessed 2D Seismic Data

Recent 2D reimaging seismic data reveal attractive exploration opportunities with contrasting trapping mechanisms in the Ceara basin, located in the southeastern part of the Brazilian Equatorial Margin. This basin could have a great hydrocarbon potential by having plays analogous to those successfully evaluated in Guyana and West Africa basins. So far, the exploration efforts in the Ceara basin have been focused within the shallow water, targeting syn-rift plays, from which the main success has been some shelf producing fields. The deepwater province of Ceara is considered an exploration frontier. We show current results of the ongoing regional seismic interpretation in the western and central sector of Ceara basin using the recently reprocessed 2D data and the available information from the shallow water wells. The enhanced seismic image of this 2D reprocessed data enables a better documentation of the tectonostratigraphic evolution of the basin going from a transform margin to a passive margin setting. Having a better idea of this geological history is key to understanding the play type diversity and distribution. In this study, the greatest diversity of play types is identified in the Ceara central sector, which was affected by a transpressional regime related to the Romanche fracture zone.