Paper submitted to EGYPES 2026, by Mark Hamilton (TGS) and Mahmoud Khattab (EGAS)
Summary
Egypt’s West Mediterranean Sea remains frontier however, a diversity of plays, new 3D seismic data, and recent exploration drilling success are making this area an exploration hotspot.
The area until recently had remained unproven as there were several challenges to exploration when compared to surrounding geographies. Deeper water and challenging seismic imaging have been two of the major obstacles that have hindered exploration progress in this area in the past. However, deep water drilling has become commonplace in recent decades and modern data acquisition (e.g. long offset and wide azimuth or OBN data) and imaging techniques (e.g. elastic FWI) are addressing the imaging challenges caused largely by complex Messinian evaporites as well as mobile shale. We demonstrate, using seismic examples, the improvements that some of these techniques have resulted in.