Ekofisk FieldNorway

Central Graben, North Sea

CHARLES T. FEAZEL
IAN A. KNIGHT
LAWRENCE J. PEKOT
Phillips Petroleum Company
Bartlesville, Oklahoma
FIELD CLASSIFICATION
BASIN: North Sea
BASIN TYPE: Rift
RESERVOIR ROCK TYPE: Chalk (Fractured)
RESERVOIR ENVIRONMENT OF
DEPOSITION: Pelagic Coccolith Ooze
Resedimented Mainly by Debris Flow

RESERVOIR AGE: Cretaceous-Paleocene

PETROLEUM TYPE: Oil
TRAP TYPE: Elongate Anticline

Petrofina) drilled the 2/4-1X well on the upturned

edge of what was believed to be a block-faulted dome.

LOCATION
Ekofisk field and its satellite fields (West Ekofisk,
Albuskjell, Tor, Eldfisk, and Edda), collectively
known as the Greater Ekofisk area, lie within the
Central graben of the North Sea (Norwegian Sector)
(Figure 1). Water depth at Ekofisk is 230 ft (70 m).
First of the North Sea commercial oil discoveries,
Ekofisk is a giant field, with an estimated 6.70 billion
bbl of stock tank oil and 10.330 tcf of gas in place
at the time of discovery. Ultimate recoverable
petroleum includes approximately 1.5 billion bbl of
oil and 5 tcf of gas. The field produces from 39 wells,
and a waterflood project is underway.

Discovery
Common-reflection-point seismic data (Figure 2)
showed a reflection immediately above the top of the
Danian section that bowed upward to form a dome
with 800 ft (244 m) of closure. The initial interpretation of this structure included a graben at its crest,
so a drilling program was designed to test the
upturned rims of the strata surrounding the central
faulted region.
The first well, the 2/4-1X, was drilled as high as
possible on the structure without penetrating the
apparent collapse zone in the center. The well was
abandoned after repeated well flow and lost circulation problems occurred while drilling through
Miocene carbonates, where an oil show was noted.
In December 1969, a second well, the Phillips 2/4
A-1X, was drilled through the Miocene without
difficulty and encountered 600 ft of oil shows in the
Danian and Maastrichtian chalk. Earliest tests of
the interval from 10,364 to 10,464 ft (3159-3190 m)
flowed 1071 BOPD, with API gravity of 37.2. Later
tests sustained flow rates exceeding 10,000 BOPD
(Van den Bark and Thomas, 1981).
It was not until other wells were drilled on the
periphery of the "collapse zone," initial production
was underway, and permanent platforms were
installed on the seabed that a well was drilled in
the center of the structure. What had been interpreted as a graben proved to be the crest of a dome

HISTORY
Pre-Discovery
Offshore exploration activity began in the shallow
waters of the Southern Gas basin of the North Sea,
primarily encouraged by the discovery of the giant
Groningen field on the Netherlands coast. From
there, exploration drilling progressed northward into
the deeper waters of the northern North Sea with
limited success. By 1969, over 200 offshore exploratory wells had been drilled, of which 32 were within
the Norwegian Sector. Increasing pessimism toward
the prospectivity of the North Sea was finally
removed at the end of 1969, when the Phillips Norway
Group (Phillips, AGIP, Elf, Norsk Hydro, Total, and
1