Frontier Basin Study: Offshore Eastern Sri Lanka Basin, 2D Petroleum System Modelling

Summary Sri Lanka offshore basins are high-potential, frontier basins with little existing exploration activity and few previously acquired data sets. The offshore is composed of several sub-basins and, for these basins, so far only five wells have been drilled in the northern Gulf of Mannar. The rest of Sri Lanka offshore basins remain under-explored. To reconstruct the geological history of Sri Lanka, the paleo-position and tectonic movements of the East Africa conjugate margin related to Madagascar, India, Sri Lanka, and Antarctica are of pertinent interest. This study aims to understand the offshore Eastern Sri Lanka petroleum systems. To do this, we applied two-dimensional petroleum system modelling along two representative sections in the offshore basin of Eastern Sri Lanka by employing information from analogue Gondwana breakup-related basins offshore Mozambique (Angoche) and Eastern India (Krishna-Godavari (K-G)). Source rocks were postulated to occur in syn-rift graben and post-rift marine depositional settings. Thermal history modelling included temporal and spatial variations heat flow to consider the evolution from rift to drift phases. This pilot project aims to acquire knowledge on the hydrocarbon prospectivities of the offshore Eastern Sri Lanka region.