Abstract
The Southern North Sea Basins of the United Kingdom were renowned for their hydrocarbon resources and exploited extensively from the 1960s to the 1990s. The Permian Leman Sandstone in particular formed an excellent reservoir due to its extensive clean aeolian sediments and was subsequently explored for decades, resulting in a wealth of subsurface data that are now widely accessible. The strata of the Leman Sandstone comprises mixed continental deposits from aeolian, fluvial and lacustrine environments which interfinger with the saline lake deposits of the Silverpit Formation. With the potential reassessment of depleted gas reservoirs in the North Sea for use as sequestration targets for captured carbon dioxide, there is significant renewed interest in the reservoir geology of the Leman Sandstone. A regional study of the sedimentology and petrophysical properties of the Leman Sandstone and Silverpit formations within quadrants 43, 44, 48 and 49 of the Southern North Sea has been conducted. Multiple interactions between the depositional environments are observed, resulting in a complex interplay between aeolian and lacustrine transgressive/regressive events, and migration and expansion/contraction of the fluvial system. In wireline petrophysical data, each depositional environment, along with their transitional environments, form relatively distinct clusters that can be used as a predictive tool for reservoir interpretation in the absence of core, despite extensive sediment recycling between environments.
Original language | English |
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Number of pages | 22 |
Journal | Geoenergy |
Volume | 1 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 30 Nov 2023 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Dec 2023 |
Bibliographical note
The sedimentological analysis for the study was undertaken during a PhD research project as part of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Oil & Gas under its Extending the Life of Mature Basins theme [grant number: NEM00578X/1]. It was sponsored by NERC and the British Geological Survey (BGS) via the British University Funding Initiative (BUFI) whose support is gratefully acknowledged. We are also thankful to the BGS at Keyworth for access to the core store, and the UK National Data Repository (NDR) for access to the well data. We are grateful to Schlumberger for licensed use of Petrel software at the University of Aberdeen. We would also like to thank the reviewers: Conxita Taberner, Gokturk Mehmet Dilci, Mark Bentley, and one anonymous reviewer for their constructive feedback that has helped improve the manuscript.Data Availability Statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.Keywords
- Carbon Storage & Utilization
- Petroleum Geoscience and Geoenergy
- Reservoir Characterization
- Sedimentology