Lusitanian Basin Petroleum System (Portugal)

This course is for any geoscientist and any participant at bachelor or master level. In addition, owing to the variety of the covered themes, this course is also of the greatest interest for more advanced professionals.

Atlantic margins may be prolific petroleum provinces. They yield thick sedimentary infills, from continental siliciclastics to carbonates and turbidites.
Different source-rocks and reservoirs developed in these basins where maturation is related mainly to intense subsidence and overburden during the rift phase.
Extension is also responsible for prominent rotated block geometries, creating both structural and stratigraphic traps.
Moreover, the presence of salt-rich layers, related with the initial extensional phases, originated intense salt-tectonics and related migration pathways and traps.
In some cases, the Tertiary inversion affected the basins, up-lifting parts of them and increasing their structuration and complexity. It was also responsible for totally exposing the basins and for providing excellent outcrop observation conditions, as in the case of the Lusitanian Basin.

This field training aims to show the diversity and complexity of a totally exposed Atlantic margin, located in Western Iberia - the Lusitanian Basin (Portugal).

Participants will have access to different kinds of information, including extensive field outcrops, geological maps and seismic lines, wells and geochemical data.

The objective is to analyze and integrate those data into a regionally coherent approach, in order to understand the basin petroleum system and its different plays.

Aspects like paleogeography, facies and their thickness variations, overburden and maturation, structuration and traps, etc., with specific basin modelling examples, will be discussed.

Priority is given to field observation at various scales. This course is a “back-to-basics” refreshment training, covering a wide range of data, which is the daily challenge for any exploration team.

Presentation of the field course. Overview of the Basin and its petroleum systems.

Each participant is required to provide a yearly medical certificate before attending this field training (even if the access to the outcrops is within the reach of everyone).

The Lusitanian Basin is located near Lisbon international airport, and can also be used for Team Building purposes, in mostly natural coastal environments that are usually very well appreciated.