Tertiary Deep-Marine Reservoirs of the North Sea Region
Discovery of the Arbroath, Montrose and Forties fields initiated intensive exploration of the Tertiary deep-marine play in the North Sea region. Subsequent discoveries demonstrated the success of this play and the geological diversity of the depositional systems. The play is now mature and in many areas the remaining exploration potential is likely to be dominated by small, subtle traps with a major component of stratigraphic trapping. Economically marginal discoveries need an in-depth understanding of subsurface uncertainty to mitigate risk with limited appraisal wells. Mature fields require detailed geological understanding in the search for the remaining oil. This volume focuses on the regional depositional setting of these deep-marine systems, providing a stratigraphic and palaeogeographical context for exploration, and development case histories that outline the challenges of producing from these reservoirs. The fields are arranged around the production life cycle, describing the changing needs of geological models as the flow of static and dynamic data refines geological understanding and defines the nature of new opportunities as fields mature.
Volund Field: development of an Eocene sandstone injection complex, offshore Norway
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Published:January 01, 2015
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CiteCitation
Anne M. Schwab, Eric W. Jameson, Ann Townsley, 2015. "Volund Field: development of an Eocene sandstone injection complex, offshore Norway", Tertiary Deep-Marine Reservoirs of the North Sea Region, T. McKie, P. T. S. Rose, A. J. Hartley, D. W. Jones, T. L. Armstrong
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Abstract
The Volund Field lies in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea (Quad 24/9). This field produces from a ‘classic’ large-scale sandstone injection complex located in Lower Eocene strata. The sandstone reservoir has been injected into the lower permeability surrounding mudstones of the Sele and Balder formations and Hordaland Group to create an ‘intrusive trap’. The Volund Field consists of a deeper central unit of stacked sandstone sills, surrounded by shallower, steeper-dipping injected sandstone dykes, which make excellent reservoirs with consistently high porosity and permeability. Many of the steeply-dipping injected dykes appear to have excellent connectivity from the water leg through the oil leg and into the gas cap. The complex was identified on seismic data that exhibit a Class 3 amplitude versus offset (AVO) signature on the far-offset stack reflection seismic volume. The seismic data have been used to successfully locate horizontal production wells. Volund seismic geobodies have been extracted and incorporated into the reservoir geomodel to determine the geometry of the injectite features and to populate sands within the injection complex. Volund Field (estimated mean gross resource of 54 mmboe (million barrels oil equivalent)) is producing oil from four horizontal branches (end December 2012), with one water injector well, and has a common oil–water contact and gas–oil contact.
- Atlantic Ocean
- AVO methods
- Cenozoic
- clastic rocks
- connectivity
- directional drilling
- drilling
- Eocene
- Europe
- geophysical methods
- horizontal drilling
- mudstone
- North Atlantic
- North Sea
- Norway
- offshore
- oil and gas fields
- oil wells
- oil-gas interface
- oil-water interface
- Paleogene
- permeability
- petroleum
- porosity
- reflection methods
- reservoir rocks
- sandstone
- sandstone dikes
- Scandinavia
- sedimentary rocks
- sedimentary structures
- seismic methods
- soft sediment deformation
- Tertiary
- Western Europe
- Sele Formation
- Balder Formation
- Hordaland Group
- Volund Field