Paper submitted to EAGE Sub-Saharan Africa Energy Forum, by Felicia Winter (TGS)
Summary
In frontier basins such as the Angoche offshore Mozambique do often provide structural understanding based on regional 2D data sets, which can provide a reasonable understanding of the thermal and burial history of the basin, allowing the assessment of source maturity and hydrocarbons in the basin, as long as proof of source rock presence exists, such as the samples from ODP wells 692B and 693 which targeted locations that sat in the wider Mozambique Channel during the Late Jurassic-Early Cretaceous era. The detailed mapping of fairways, moreover a robust mapping of reservoir quality sands within large offshore systems across a long time-span and varying sediment influx routes is, however, quite challenging without additional or wide coverage of 3D seismic data. A much better understanding of mixed turbidite-contourite systems and their overall typical diagnostics can improve reservoir presence and trapping significantly if applied in the context of reservoir provenance and existing discoveries such as from the nearby Rovuma Basin, as this study will show.