Western Desert Petroleum System: New Exploration Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

The Western Desert province is one of Egypt’s most productive hydrocarbon provinces, ranking second in terms of oil production after the Gulf of Suez province and second in terms of gas and condensate production after the Nile Delta. Over the last few decades, many discoveries and thousands of wells have been drilled to explore hydrocarbons in the organic-rich sedimentary basins of the Western Desert. This chapter aims to provide comprehensive studies on the Western Desert’s total petroleum system, as well as the tectono-stratigraphic history control on petroleum system development across the basins. The dominant source rocks, conventional reservoirs, unconventional reservoirs, seals, and petroleum traps have all been thoroughly discussed in this chapter. This chapter also includes the major Western Desert sedimentary basins and their petroleum systems in detail. Furthermore, this chapter introduces new exploration opportunities as a means of achieving successful exploration and the discovery of new resources, such as stratigraphic traps, deeper targets, inversion structures and faulted traps, sequence stratigraphy application, and unconventional resources. Finally, the chapter discusses the challenges that could affect hydrocarbon exploration in the Western Desert, such as drilling, petroleum systems, and seismic imaging, as well as some mitigations.