Where should we explore in the Halten Terrace? -GIS and Characteristic analysis applied to a mature play in the Norwegian Sea

Characteristic analysis (CA) has been re-implemented in a GIS environment and used to calculate the favorability for rotated fault block traps in the Halten Terrace play from the Norwegian Sea. Vector maps available from the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate containing structural and play information from Upper and Lower Jurassic reservoirs form the basis for the input attributes. The ArcGIS system is used to calculate the favorabilities resulting from the CA method. The favorability based upon CA can be interpreted in terms of the geological information captured from the input attributes and evaluated against the objectives of the study. It is shown that adequate attribute preprocessing is vital for a good result and that image analysis and GIS are ideal tools to perform the tuning of ternary coding used as input. The favorabilities obtained show how the CA method can be used to express the favorability for fault related traps.