New Insights into the Black Sea Basin, in the Light of the Reprocessing of Vintage Regional Seismic Data

Any petroleum exploration or regional model construction need a detailed understanding of the geologic evolution of the basin under consideration. This is possible only through a careful regional scale interpretation of the data available. The prolongation of any geological model from a relatively well to a less constrained area is always challenging. This is the case of the Western Black Sea Basin where the stratigraphic correlation from the shelf to deep water is not straightforward. So far this was in part due to the fact that the backbone of any regional interpretation in the Black Sea have been the OGS and DSS lines acquired in 70s that were available as paper sections only. The acquisition and publication of the new regional industry lines, driven by the new deep water hydrocarbon exploration, eased and improved the geological interpretation of this area. In the light of the results emerging from the availability of the new data, a revision of the vintage data was considered advisable. It is known, in fact, that the reprocessing of vintage seismic data that takes advantage of new and modern processing techniques can be a useful tool to unlock the potential of such data. This is the case of the OGS seismic lines acquired in the Black Sea Basin during the 1975 campaign. The reprocessed lines have been integrated with published regional seismic and well data resulting in a coherent geological model correlating the Western Black Sea margins crossing the deep water part of the basin.