Understanding Petroleum Systems Risk in the Deep Middle Eastern Plays: A Regional Screening Approach

The Mesozoic and Cenozoic petroleum systems of the Middle East are well renowned for producing large volumes of hydrocarbons to support and supply global demands for oil and gas. Thus far, much of the exploration and production has been focused on these shallower Mesozoic and Cenozoic petroleum systems, helping locate many of the giant and supergiant hydrocarbon fields, particularly along the eastern backbone of the Arabian Peninsula. However, the existing contributions from the Paleozoic are still significant. Vast reserves of gas in the Permo-Triassic Khuff carbonates, for example, are charged from the world-class Silurian Qusaiba Formation which is widespread across Arabia. Within the public domain, there are large volumes of multi-disciplinary data to assess, understand, analyze, and determine the distribution of petroleum system elements associated with the Mesozoic and Cenozoic plays. The availability of such valuable data begins to fade beyond the Permian, further reducing to isolated ‘pockets’ of data in the Precambrian-Cambrian. This lack of subsurface penetrations into the Paleozoic stratigraphy results in uncertainty in the distribution of petroleum system elements with increasing depth. To date, only clusters of successful Paleozoic discoveries are in Central Arabia (Ghawar area), the Arabian Gulf, Zagros, and Oman. To further illuminate the exploration potential of this underexplored Paleozoic interval in the Middle East, a plate-wide screening approach has been conducted to help identify ‘zones’ of exploration potential with multiple stacked opportunities for plays. This article will focus on six play fairways which span the Paleozoic and earliest Mesozoic including: