DEEP-WATER FACIES MODELS: AN OVERVIEW

Recent advances in seismic data quality, as well as attribute and visualization techniques, are providing geoscientists with an unparalleled opportunity to image deep-water reservoirs. These seismic datasets, coupled with well log penetrations, and recent detailed outcrop studies, has led to a revolution in our knowledge of the stratigraphy, depositional processes, architectures, and facies models of deep-water deposits.

Seismic & well data from West Africa and the Gulf of Mexico, coupled with published outcrop work in West Texas and California have documented systematic updip to downdip variations in slope feeder systems and complex architectural relationships between a variety of channel complexes, mass transport complexes, and condensed strata. Seismic and well data from the North Sea coupled with published outcrop work in West Texas, Ireland, and South Africa has revealed systematic updip to downdip architectural variations in basin floor fan complexes. Research, exploration, and production datasets from the Gulf of Mexico have illustrated hybrid slope (minibasin) systems that sometimes act as depositional basins and sometimes act as bypass slope systems due to salt movement. These hybrid systems are dominated by alternations of fan complexes, mass transport complexes, and condensed sections.