Characteristics of marine CSEM responses in complex geologic terrain of Niger Delta Oil province: Insight from 2.5D finite element forward modeling

Mapping hydrocarbon reservoirs with sufficient resistivity contrasts between them and the surrounding layers has been demonstrated using marine Controlled Source Electromagnetic (mCSEM) technique in this study. The methodology was applied to the Niger Delta hydrocarbon province where resistive targets are located in a wide range of depths beneath variable seawater depths in the presence of heterogeneous overburden. An efficient 2.5D adaptive finite element (FE) forward modeling code was used to delineate the characteristics of the mCSEM responses on geological models; and to establish the suitable transmission and detectable frequencies for targets with variable seawater and burial depths. The models consist of three resistive hydrocarbon layers of 100 Om resistivity, two of which overlain each other. This presents an OPPORTUNITY to study and understand the 2.5D marine CSEM responses such as the transmission frequency, transmitter–receiver-target geometry, seawater depth and burial depth of the resistive hydrocarbon layers that is characteristics of the region. We found that mCSEM response to two vertically-placed thin resistors is higher than that of the individual resistive layer, which could be a veritable tool to identify the two reservoirs, which would have been previously identified by seismic, as possible hydrocarbon layers. For the seawater depths model, detectability of the resistive hydrocarbon increases for the deeper models but decreases for the shallow anomalous depths (305-m and 500-m subsea). This is noticeable for all offsets in the electric filed amplitude responses. The responses are obvious and distinct for the long range electric fields models. The modeling results also indicates that lower frequencies produce high E-field amplitude though higher frequencies generate higher anomaly measured as normalized amplitude ratio (NAR). Generally, it was deduced that expanded frequency spectrum will be needed to significantly resolve thin resistive layers owing to the wide range of burial depths and sharply variable seawater depths in the region.