Twenty-four oil and/or gas discoveries have been made offshore Newfoundland and Labrador. Three of the oil discoveries have been developed and a fourth is under consideration. The focus of development activity has been on the larger oil discoveries. As production from the larger discoveries matures, facilities and other infrastructure will become available for development of the remaining smaller discoveries. Development and tie-in of smaller pools and fields provides an opportunity to utilize this spare production capacity at these fields. Currently, there are several satellite tie-in and expansion projects in progress and others are under review. Development of the discovered smaller fields will play an important part in sustaining production from offshore Newfoundland and Labrador. In addition, many of the offshore basins are under explored and represent other opportunities to supply the next round of developments.
Introduction
Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada's easterly province (Fig. 1) is strategically positioned on international shipping lanes, with unique access to global petroleum markets.
Amplified Geochemical Imaging technology (Anderson, 2006) was utilized to geochemically sample shallow sea bottom cores for the presence of hydrocarbons at nanogram (10-9) levels. To date, this 170 cores were selected by Nalcor Energy Oil and Gas as a pilot program to perform geochemical sampling from select areas off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. The objective was to determine if there are indications of petroleum hydrocarbons on any of the cores. The cores selected for study were selected from sealed and refrigerated material collected over the last 11 years on the assumption that these were the most likely cores to retain significant geochemical signature. Results from this pilot study are encouraging, prompting Nalcor Energy Oil and Gas to expand the study into other areas, and investigate the use of older core material.
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