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The Petroleum Potential of the Saba Bank Area, Netherlands Antilles*
By
Richard E. Church1 and Kevin R. Allison2
Search and Discovery Article #10076 (2004)
Posted December 20, 2004
*Adapted from PowerPoint images, accompanied by text, prepared for presentation to interested parties.
1Denver, CO (richardechurch@msn.com)
2Highlands Ranch, CO (kevin@pangaea-energy.com)
Saba Bank is a submerged carbonate bank in the northeastern Caribbean Sea, located five kilometers southwest of the northern Lesser Antilles island of Saba. It is approximately 140 kilometers east-southeast of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. The bank is an elliptical platform 10 to 100 meters below sea level, covering approximately 2200 square kilometers. Saba Bank is part of the Netherlands Antilles, and petroleum activities on the bank are administered by Saba Bank Petroleum Resources, a company jointly owned by the central government of the Netherlands Antilles and the island governments of Saba, Sint Maarten, and Sint Eustatius.
Saba Bank is a backarc basin on the west side of the northern Lesser Antilles, a slowly moving, active margin island arc on the eastern edge of the Caribbean Plate under which Atlantic oceanic crust is being subducted.
Exploration activities, including the acquisition and interpretation of 4300 kilometers of seismic data and the drilling of two wells in the southeastern part of the bank, have defined a Tertiary basin with over 4000 meters of Recent-Eocene sedimentary fill in the eastern half of the bank and a western shelf with a thin Tertiary section underlain by a thick pre-Eocene (Cretaceous?) sedimentary sequence. The basin and shelf areas are separated by a major wrench fault with associated flower structures.
Saba Bank No. 1 tested a mid-Tertiary reef, 934 meters thick; it contained several porous, permeable intervals, but the only indications of hydrocarbons were minor gas shows. Saba Bank No. 2, on a high deeper in the basin, encountered a turbidite/deepwater fan sequence, instead of the reef. Minor gas shows during drilling and log interpretation indicated the presence of possible gas-bearing reservoirs. Geochemical studies suggest that the hydrocarbons represent migrated hydrocarbon generated from deeper, more mature source rock.
A large four-way dip closed prospect with the potential for substantial hydrocarbon reserves has been developed on the untested western shelf area of Saba Bank.
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