Norway is well-positioned to assure Europe's security well into the next decade. The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate estimates that 24 billion barrels of oil equivalent are still to be discovered in their offshore territory. Energy security and higher prices are expected to encourage explorers to re-evaluate forgotten gas-prone basins such as the Møre and Vøring basins in the Norwegian Sea Atlantic Margin. Proximity to the EU market and the ability to support new infrastructure makes any discovery valuable, and the chance of making significant finds is considerable.
In some cases, exploration had previously been hampered by a lack of geological understanding in the region where where few wells have been drilled geoscientists previously did not have access to sharp, well-defined subsurface images of drilling targets nor any facts or knowledge about the intra- and sub-basalt sedimentology.
However, things have dramatically changed in this region over the last few years. TGS now offers over 59,000 km2 of regionally consistent high-quality 3D coverage in an area . This modern seismic (acquired since 2017) in these two basins. Our data indicates new sand fairways, new pre-Cretaceous highs, and 50-60 commercial-sized gas or oil leads and has opened up new under-explored plays in shallow (Miocene-Pliocene) and deeper target intervals where sill intrusions and basalt have previously been a challenge.
Crucially, TGS seismic has been unable to unveil the prospects hidden by complex basalt rock. Through exclusive seismic imaging algorithms such as dynamic matching full waveform inversion (DM FWI) and Common Offset Reverse Time Migration algorithms, subsurface velocities can be interpreted separately with extremely high confidence and in greater detail. Specific features such as terrains of rotated fault blocks can now be identified beneath the basalts. The seismic velocities below basalt are slow, indicating well-preserved sediments under various thicknesses of volcanic rock.
