Regional PhaseFinder Package: Barents Sea

The Barents Sea is well known for its unusual basin evolution which has resulted in the discovery of abundant gas and little oil. New play models combined with a better understanding of basin evolution has led to a renewed interest in the area.

Critical elements of basin evolution include the timing of Cenozoic inversion, and the occurrence, distribution and characteristics of individual source rock intervals. Recent results indicate that a very recent timing of inversion is most likely, essentially linking erosion to Pleistocene glaciation (Cavanagh et al., 2006)

The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate has defined a total of 7 petroleum plays covering Carboniferous to Tertiary intervals. Key source rocks are the Upper Devonian Domanik Fm. Equivalents, Carboniferous shales and coals, Triassic Botneheia equivalents, Upper Triassic black shales, Lower Jurassic shales, Upper Jurassic Hekkingen Fm. as well as Cretaceous shales of Aptian-Albian and Barremian age.

GeoS4's Barents Sea PhaseFinder package allows the combination of source specific compositional predictions of petroleum, following the PhaseKinetic approach (di Primio and Horsfield, 2006), with petroleum system modelling. The correct reproduction of petroleum phase behaviour represents a major step forward in modelling fluid generation, migration and accumulation in this complex setting.

The Samples

The PhaseKinetics database

• Predicts petroleum compositions in time and space
• 2- and 4-component kinetic model for GOR prediction
• 14-component kinetic model for physical property/PVT prediction
• Contains bulk kinetic parameters measured at slow heating rates
• Assigns petroleum type organofacies
• Can be directly integrated into basin models of the study area

The Package

• Supplied with PetroMod input files of pseudo-compound physical properties for better API prediction
• Ask about PhaseKinetics Plus for carbon isotopic compositions of gases