The Nile Delta is an emerging giant gas province with proven reserves of approximately 42 × 1012SCF. This resource has more than doubled in the last three years, largely from successful deep water exploration for Pliocene slope-channel systems. Proven reservoirs vary in age from Oligocene through Pleistocene. Source rocks include Jurassic coals and shales and the Lower Miocene condensed Qantara Formation shales. Additional source rocks may be present in condensed intervals of Cretaceous, Oligocene and Eocene age.Following Tethyan rifting and opening of the Mediterranean in the Jurassic, prominent Cretaceous mixed clastic and carbonate shelf edges aggraded vertically along a steep fault-bounded shelf-slope break (the ‘hingeline’) in northern Egypt, which exerts the fundamental control on reservoir distribution in Tertiary age strata. In late Eocene time, northern Egypt was tilted toward the Mediterranean during regional uplift associated with the opening of the Gulf of Suez and Red Sea rifts. Drainage systems shed reservoir quality sediments northward in a series of forced regressions. These regressions culminated in be-heading of the youngest deltas by subaerial erosion during the Messinian salinity crisis. Early Pliocene transgressions laid a thick sealing interval over the low-stand Messinian valley networks. Renewed deltaic deposition began at approximately 3.8Ma.The steep structural hingeline and faulted continental shelf created a large amount of accommodation space with relatively minor progradation of depositional systems. As a result, the primary play consists of slope-channel fairways in all levels. The Pliocene systems are the shallowest targets in the basin and future large reserve growth will come from the pre-Messinian strata.Nile Delta gas resources lie close to emerging and established markets in the Mediterranean. Challenges to capturing the deeper pre-Messinian prize include:establishing favourable economic terms for export and domestic markets;reducing drilling costs and optimization of wellbore patterns to develop multiple stacked objectives;working in deep water and high pressure environments;developing predictive models for pressure regressions in overpressured reservoir fairways;recognizing and exploiting thin bedded low resistivity pay.
Sequence learning has notably been studied using the Hebb repetition paradigm (Hebb, 1961) and the serial reaction time (SRT) task (Nissen & Bullemer, Cognitive Psychology 19:1-32, 1987). These two paradigms produce robust learning effects but differ with regard to the role of awareness: Awareness does not affect learning a repeated sequence in the Hebb repetition paradigm, as is evidenced by recall performance, whereas in the SRT task, awareness helps to anticipate the location of the next stimulus. In this study, we examined the role of awareness in anticipation and recall performance, using the Hebb repetition paradigm. Eye movements were monitored during a spatial reconstruction task where participants had to memorize sequences of dot locations. One sequence was repeated every four trials. Results showed that recall performance for the repeated sequence improved across repetitions for all participants but that anticipation increased only for participants aware of the repetition.
Egypt has developed 15 .4-17 BBOE equivalent resources in three major geological provinces in the last 100 years of exploration. Nine billion barrels have been discovered in the mature province of the Gulf of Suez, an additiona12 .5 BBOE in the Western Desert and 25 TCF (4.1 BBOE) in the onshore and offshore Mediterranean Nile Delta. Future growth potential will come primarily from deeper pool Jurassic age reservoirs in the Western Desert and from deep water exploration in the Mediterranean sea. The Mediterranean trends offer by far the largest growth potential and may contain 65-84 TCF of recoverable fotore resources. This contrasas significantly with 11-33 TCF predicted for the Western Desert and 1 .5-3 BBO in the Gulf of Suez. The possible numbers of new giant fields are also highest in the Mediterranean sea. This relatively unexplored province has only 70 key exploratory welas penetrating the Pliocene section and 14 through the Serravallian (Late Miocene) strata in an area that is geographically similar to the shelf edge of the Gulf of Mexico, USA. More remote basins in the interlor of Upper Egypt and the Red Sea may hold additional resources, bot remote locations and difficult seismic imaging and other technical challenges will likely prevent rapid exploration and development of the hydrocarbon resources of these basins. This paper reviews the geological context of the Mediterranean and the challenges awaiting the industry in developing what appears to be an emerging giant petroleum province in North Africa.
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