Exploration of Serie Tobífera for oil and gas exploration, Austral Basin, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. Advances in the construction of the Geological Model

MYKIETIUK; AZPIROZ; SIMONETTO; COVELLONE; PETRINOVIC

Simposio; LASI 6 Conference; 2019

The Austral basin, also known as Magallanes, islocated on the southwestern end of the SouthAmerican plate and its southern limit is constituted bythe Scotia plate. Basin evolution started in Middle toUpper Jurassic with a regional rifting stage, whengrabens and half-grabens were filled with volcanicand volcaniclastic rocks, named ?Serie Tobífera?,being this unit, historically considered the economicbasement of the basin.Because of its complex nature ?Serie Tobífera´s?exploration requested a different methodologycompared with the overlaying clastic targets. For thiscase resulted imperative to understand the volcanicenvironment and the distribution of volcanic andvolcaniclastic facies, in order to minimize theuncertainty in explorations projects.In recent years, YPF drilled several wells in theSerie Tobífera (as a target), obtaining both positiveand negative results in terms of hydrocarbonproductivity. The hydrocarbons are housed intofractures (tectonics and cooling), and there is arelationship between the kind of fracture and thevolcanic facies; therefore, it is very important to havea solid geological model for the exploration ofhydrocarbons in this complex geological setting.During the last year an integration of theinformation available was carried out in order to builda Predictive Geological model. Drill cores, side wellcores, conventional logs, image logs from andseismic data from the Argentinean wells (Fig.1), wereconsolidated in one model with previousinterpretations of the Chilenean wells (Covellone,2016; Azpiroz et al., 2018; Atencio et al., 2018).