The article reveals the history of geological exploration at one of the sites (block 12/11) of the Nam Con Shon basin on the shelf of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. A concrete example demonstrates the complexity of the task of finding productive deposits in a geological area where active tectonic processes accompanied sedimentation throughout the history of the formation of productive layers. The article describes the history of exploration since 1973, when eight large oil and gas companies (Pecten, AGIP, ONGC, BP-Statoil Alliance, etc.) at different times tried their hand at exploring the oil and gas prospects of this block. Despite a significant amount of drilling and seismic research, none of the subsoil users has moved to the industrial development of the site. In 2012, due to the transfer of license rights to Zarubezhneft JSC, the company faced a difficult task to continue geological exploration and, subsequently, to develop a commercially effective scheme for involving deposits in commercial operation. The operator of the project was the company Vietsovpetro JV, a subsidiary of Zarubezhneft JSC in Vietnam. The article describes the approaches of Zarubezhneft JSC to geological exploration. The results of work on 3D seismic survey and various variants of their interpretation are presented. The regional geological description of the work site, the results of the analysis of the geological structure and basin modeling are given, the oil source rocks are determined and trends in the development of oil and gas deposits are substantiated, promising search areas are determined. The results of exploratory drilling, the history of new discoveries and the strategy of field development are described.
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