Hunting for Africa’s new transform play trends

The abyssal plains of Africa’s passive margins have been inaccessible to drilling until recently, and traps for true basin floor fans little explored. Turbidite flows reaching the basin floor through confined slope channels can begin to lose energy and deposit coarser clastic components, although if the basin floor continues to gently slope down in an offshore or lateral direction then turbidite flows can continue for long distances. However, younger, hotter and more buoyant oceanic crust generally lies offshore from older, colder oceanic crust riding deeper on the mantle. This creates an up-dip-to-offshore (UDTO) geometry to the basin floor. UDTO basins, can therefore present opportunities for basin floor turbidite flows to onlap and form stratigraphic trapping geometries towards the offshore on oceanic crust. Yet such plays are often in water deeper than 3 km (i.e. the Early Cretaceous basin floor play under the Raya-1 well offshore Uruguay), unless the crust is supported by mantle convection (Yakaar-1 offshore Senegal).