At the end of the first day of the ASPO conference in Denver, we were treated to a fantastic presentation on the oil potential of the sub-salt basins on the margins of the South Atlantic Ocean given by Dr Marcio Mello who presented the evidence for a half trillion barrels of reserves in this new frontier province. So has a new Saudi Arabia been found?
Marcio Mello is president of HRT Petroleum, a Brazillian geological services company. Dr Mello's talk began with some background to the Tupi discovery in the Santos Basin, Brazil, and went on to extrapolate the geological and petroleum systems of Tupi to basins off southern Africa, the Amazon Basin, The Gulf of Mexico and The Congo Basin.
Dr Mello explained how the discovery of "diamondoid" structures in oil at shallow depth in Brazil gave evidence for mixing two types of petroleum, one that must have been formed at great depth below the Salt that blankets this basin. He had for many years tried to persuade Petrobras to drill deep, into the sub-salt strata, which of course they did eventually do leading to the discovery of Tupi.
The Tupi Field occurs in limestone reservoir at extraordinary depths of around 6000 meters beneath a salt layer that is around 2000 m thick. At such depths, temperatures would normally be too high for oil to survive but the secrets here are a combination of deep water and the conducting character of the salt which results in hot but tollerable temperatures at these great depths where the drill bit has proven intermediate grade crude oil to exist.
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/50388
