Promoting exploration potential in the UKCS for the OGA

Overview

The Oil and Gas Authority works with industry in the UK to maximise the economic recovery from UK oil and gas. Their role is to regulate, influence and promote the UK oil and gas industry, to attract investment and with that jobs, helping to anchor valuable skills and expertise in this country to maximise the UK’s oil and gas resources.

We have worked with the UK government oil & gas regulator (previously DECC) for over 20 years and over the last three years we have been conducting multiple studies for the OGA.

The OGA’s role is to maximise the economic recovery of oil and gas from the UK, and to help this mission and promote further exploration of the UKCS they have undertaken various studies, which are gradually being released to the public. However, many of these studies had been area-specific and following industry feedback, OGA decided a larger, more holistic study was required to deliver results which could benefit a larger cross-section of industry and academia. Therefore, LR in partnership with Integrated Geochemical Interpretation (IGI) were commissioned by the OGA to complete a geochemical & geological database covering the entire UKCS. This included data from thousands of wells, with the aim to help companies evaluate petroleum systems across the UKCS.

How we helped

Through collaboration with IGI we brought together wide-ranging technical expertise, from geoscience to geochemistry, to correlate and analyse the data. The subsurface world is one we know well. Our experience of executing subsurface studies across the UKCS, paired with our knowledge of the public domain data, enabled us to deliver the significant scope within an 11 month timeframe:

• A UKCS wide geochemical database
• High level geochemical interpretation reports
• Geochemical well data tied to consistent geological/stratigraphic information
• Regional depth structure surfaces
• Shallow seismic interpretation of hydrocarbon anomalies
• Petrophysical interpretation of marginal source rocks
• ArcGIS project showing all technical results in a geospatial format

The impact

The project provided the OGA with an integrated and holistic product to release into the public domain, which is especially important with the upcoming 32nd licensing round.

This new data provides operators with a database to use to evaluate source rocks and petroleum systems across the UKCS which is supported by various other geoscientific interpretations.

We hope oil and gas operators will be able to use this new data to maximise their exploration activities in the region throughout the upcoming 32nd licencing round.

We have also presented the results from the study and how this new data can help operators at this year’s DEVEX and EAGE.

Benefits

• Holistic and integrated geoscientific product for OGA to release in support of exploration activities in the UKCS and maximise economic recovery.
• Quality controlled and consistent database for operators looking to explore the UKCS
• Public domain data in user friendly formats.

The full release of the data will be at the end of June or start of July 2019.