Geology of the Brent Group

The Middle Jurassic Brent Group sediments and their correlatives on the Norwegian shelf are, in economic terms, the most important hydrocarbon reservoir in NW Europe. In 1971 the Brent Field was discovered by Shell/Esso and tested in 1972 with 1.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil; nine major Brent sandstone fields were discovered by the end of 1973 (Brennand et al. 1990). In 1980 the northern North Sea (overwhelmingly comprising fields with Brent Group reservoirs) was ranked as the 13th largest petroleum province in the world, containing 1.60f produced and recoverable oil equivalent reserves (Ivanhoe 1980). By 1988, discovered Brent hydrocarbons comprised some 490f the UK’s recoverable reserves, totalling 22.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent. Brent recoverable hydrocarbons currently known in the Norwegian sector add approximately 8 billion barrels of oil equivalent (Brennand et al. 1990). Now that the UK Brent Province has reached maturity in exploration terms, this book provides a timely review of the geology and petroleum geology of one of the worlds major petroleum reservoirs. The book provides a wide-ranging coverage of Brent Group geology, including exploration history, structural evolution, sequence stratigraphy, sedimentology, diagenesis, palynology, hydrocarbon generation and migration, and petrophysics. Accounts of the geology of individual Brent Group fields are not included, as these are available in the books of Spencer et al. (1986) and Abbotts (1991).