WELCOME

Recent years have witnessed many significant petroleum exploration discoveries in mature basins, particularly in Southeast Asia, but also around the world. Exploration in mature basins has the benefits of well-established infrastructure and extensive geoscience and engineering knowledge and experience. However, unlocking the large hidden potential of mature provinces requires innovative solutions, such as improved imaging of deep targets, new thinking of petroleum plays and geological models and modern engineering solutions for managing challenging subsurface drilling and development conditions. ‘Frontier and mature basin exploration requires different skills and tools. Petroleum systems analysis, depth to oil and gas windows, pressures and basin evolution, including paleogeographic reconstructions, are essential in Frontier areas. Mature basins have abundant test data, hydrocarbon shows, pressures, logs, and other information which must be culled through and analyzed to find anomalous oil shows, compartmentalized reservoirs or by-passed pay. The work is data and time intensive but can yield substantial new reserves when coupled with new 3D seismic data, a re-look at cores and better integration’ Dolson et al, 2018 . The joint EAGE/AAPG Workshop New Discoveries in Mature Basins will bring together experts from multiple geoscience and petroleum engineering disciplines to share how advances in technology and thinking have resulted in major exploration discoveries that have breathed new life to well established petroleum provinces.