Basin-Scale Deep-Water Exploration Offshore Mozambique: Reducing Risk through Depth Imaging with Full Waveform Inversion

SummaryRecent East African offshore exploration activity has focused on northern Mozambique and southern Tanzania, driven by major gas discoveries in the Rovuma Basin. There is now renewed interest in petroleum exploration further south towards the Angoche Basin. Primary reservoir targets expected along the Angoche margin are turbidite fan systems already exploited to the north. Evaluating the regional 2D seismic data confirmed the need to acquire modern 3D broadband seismic data to de-risk and evaluate the Angoche hydrocarbon potential. From January to December 2016, a broadband 3D seismic survey was acquired ( Figure 1 ) using multimeasurement streamers that covered an area of 15,000 km2, where the water depth varied from 350 to 1500 m. Both accelerated onboard processed volumes and high-quality time migration products were subsequently produced and are discussed by Kanrar et al. (2017) . In 2018, the data was reprocessed for the purpose of identifying drilling hazards at both a regional and local scale ( Kanrar et al., 2019 ; Broadbent et al., 2019 ).