MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Falklands will attend oil convention in Canada.

The Falkland Islands will be represented at this year's American Association of Petroleum Geologists annual convention next June with a special technical presentation on “Exploring Deep Water Fans in Falklands' basins”.

Director of Minerals and Agriculture Department, Phyl Rendell and Oil Statistics Manager Alex Blake will be attending the marketing event in Calgary, Canada which is hosted by the Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists.

The AAPG is described as a useful venue which will give the Falklands delegation the chance to meet with licensee Talisman and to target other Canadian companies.

The technical program of the 2005 AAPG Annual Convention from June 19/22 will cover a wide spectrum of topics that will provide geoscientists with essential information and methodologies to aid in the search for hydrocarbons. Fifty oral and 60 poster sessions will showcase approximately 1000 technical presentations during a three-day period and will be supplemented by a wide variety of short courses, field trips and a special two-day core workshop.

Eleven main themes will be addressed during the convention: Exploration of Mature Basins; Exploration of Continental Margin Settings and Frontier Basins; Holistic Analysis of Petroleum Systems; Tectonic Systems and Basin Evolution; Depositional Systems in Time and Space; Mudrocks and Hydrocarbons; Unconventional Resources and Innovative Techniques; Optimizing Reservoirs; Business and Economic Issues; Hydrocarbons, Environment and Society; and Astrogeology.

According to AAPG, "Exploring Deep Water Fans in Falklands' Basins" is a presentation by Phil Richards, Colin Phipps, Jan Grzywacz and Giles Pickering. The paper indicates that "six wells were drilled in the North Falkland Basin in 1998.

Live oil was recovered at surface, but the only tested play exhibited difficulties of charge caused by poor migration into the targeted reservoir interval, which lies above the regional seal. Recent exploration has focused on identifying reservoir systems directly connected with the mature source rock zone. New 3D data has identified several fan systems prograding off the adjacent Palaeozoic platform, bringing clean sands into direct contact with mature source rocks. The fans are fed by major feeder channels and display numerous DHIs. They are currently located in shallow water ( <350m) but prograded into a deepwater (~500m) early Cretaceous lake system.

No wells have been drilled in the South Falkland Basin or Falkland Plateau Basin, but new seismic surveys have been targeted over Mesozoic fan systems currently in water depths of >1000m. These early Cretaceous marine fan systems provide one of the many targets available for drilling in this totally untested basin.

Analogues for both sets of fan systems are provided from several producing fields from different mature oil provinces, highlighting the potential to be tested in these Falklands fans".

At the Mineral Resources Committee meeting, Councillors were also invited to attend and Chair Stephen Luxton said that he would consider the possibility if the dates linked in with other overseas meeting.