Description
The Taranaki Basin is one of the few places in the world with such an exceptional and complete transect of upper slope to basin floor clastic deposits in outcrop. A superb field area to learn about deepwater reservoirs, seals and traps.
The Miocene deepwater deposits of the Taranaki Basin are spectacularly exposed about 40 km northeast of New Plymouth, New Zealand. This is an opportunity to learn about the stratigraphic evolution of shelf, slope, base-of-slope, and basin-floor volcaniclastic and siliciclastic assemblages that can be traced offshore to producing oil and gas fields. The processes of sedimentation and stratigraphic architecture of predominantly fine- to very fine-grained channel-fill, levee, splay (overbank, avulsion, frontal, and crevasse types), and seismic-scale mass-transport deposits will be featured from slope to basin floor, and will include visits to the Mohakatino (basin floor), upper and lower Mount Messenger (slope to base of slope), and Urenui (shelf to slope) formations.
Key risks in oil and gas drilling including reservoir presence, reservoir deliverability, trap, and seal presence will be main discussions at each stop in the itinerary, as well as recent publications on the basin featured in the research journals Marine and Petroleum Geology and AAPG Bulletin as well as Deepwater Sedimentary Systems: Science, Discovery and Applications. Located in a hybrid basin setting, these outcrops have been applied as analogues for decades to help understand geologic risk and associated uncertainty, 3D reservoir architecture, reservoir connectivity, up- to down-system and lateral turbidite distribution, and source-to-sink linkages in both active and passive margin plays.
Course Level: Skill
Duration: 5 days
