OCTOBER 2023 LUNCHEON MEETING
Brian Horn
presents
A regional exploration perspective of the Gulf of Mexico Basin:
Questions that remain
11:30 AM Wednesday, October 11, 2023
at Willow Brook Country Club
3205 W Erwin St.
Tyler, TX 75702
Cost: $25 if you RSVP
$30 at the door if you do NOT reserve
Abstract
The Gulf of Mexico one of the most extensively explored basins in the world. Discoveries throughout the past 70 years have demonstrated that the GoM is a preeminent Super Basin. With each decade and phase of exploration the basin brings new technological innovation, new opportunities, and discoveries more than >5BBO. Yet, these successes and ideas continue reveal uncertainty and questions regarding the basin’s history and evolution of depositional systems through time. Some questions are, what new play ideas remain untested, what known plays are present in new areas and what is the best approach finding new discoveries and delineating their extent?
The best ideas and concepts are grounded in observations at a basin scale. With the development of a basin-wide seismic framework it is possible to investigate outstanding questions that remain (e.g., process and origin of thick salt deposition, location and partitioning of thick deltaic successions into the deep and distal part of the basin, paleogeography of the basin prior to and after salt deposition). We present a bottom-up perspective and regional overview for the basin framework grounded in a regional evaluation to identify possible ideas regarding basin evolution, play distribution and new potential opportunities. Understanding the basin architecture, the impact on salt and sediment depositional systems through time and presence coeval basin-margin or deep-water depositional systems are not fully documented across the basin. This presentation seeks to provide a context of the ‘knowns’ and illustrate a framework to investigate the remaining ‘unknowns’ for the Gulf of Mexico to address the potential for future hydrocarbon exploration.
Biography
Brian Horn is most recently Technical Head Exploration Portfolio and Assurance at Cairn Oil and Gas in Delhi, India. Prior to joining Cairn, he was the Senior Vice President and Chief Geologist of ION E&P Advisors. He received his PhD in Geology and Geological Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines and his MSc and BA degrees in Geology from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Brian has worked in oil and gas exploration and production for over 25 years. His experience includes technical and commercial advisory, regional exploration, basin and play fairway analysis, petroleum systems, regional stratigraphic and seismic correlations as well as resource assessments. He has directed New Ventures exploration teams conducting new opportunity evaluations, regional portfolio development, technical and commercial analysis for acquisitions and divestment delivering projects that identify critical risk and are focused on returning value.