Publications

Previous studies have concluded that as much as 80 billion barrels of oil and greater than 100 TCF of gas have been generated from the Barito basin of southeastern Kalimantan, yet to date only the Tanjung Field and satellites with about 200 MMBOE EUR have been discovered in the basin (Kusuma and Darin, 1989). The apparent discrepancy was coined the Barito Dilemma by Mason et al. (1993): “Why has a basin with good source rocks, good reservoirs, multiple trap forming tectonic events and a setting and history similar to more prolific surrounding basins so far produced so little oil?” Established exploration paradigms regarding the importance of vertical migration, basin limits, regional bounding structures and shallow Pre-Tertiary basement have hindered new play generation in this frontier area. Integrated geologic studies have identified a previously unrecognized regional culmination in the Palangkaraya PSC on direct migration paths from the proven Barito and upper Kutai basins, referred to as the West Barito High. Long distance secondary oil migration (~100 km) out of the latest Miocene to Plio-Pleistocene south Barito fore-deep is required for the Barito sourced play. Recently acquired targeted geologic, geochemical and geophysical data supports the regional migration concept. Long distance migration with sufficient overburden for hydrocarbon retention is de-risked by sampled seeps and newly acquired shallow seismic reflection profiles. The excellent image quality seismic sections provide strong support for the presence of reservoir and sealing lithologies in the area with buried hill, anticlinal compaction drapes and stratigraphic trap potential. A well will be drilled in the Palangkaraya PSC in early 2015 to gather further play data and direct next generation exploration objectives.