Investigation of an Ordovician carbonate mound beneath Gotland, Sweden, using 3D seismic and well data

The Swedish island of Gotland is located within the Baltic Basin. During the Late Ordovician the region around Gotland was part of a shallow epicratonic basin in the southern subtropics. In these warm-water environments algae flourished, diverse reefs developed close to the coastline and further outboard carbonate mounds developed. These mounds formed rigid high relief structures surrounded by fine-grained siliciclastics and marls and can be detected on seismic images as isolated concave upwards features. The sedimentary succession beneath Gotland was intensely investigated in the 1970s and 1980s for its hydrocarbon potential, and subsequently, oil was commercially produced from reservoirs within Ordovician mounds. In 1981, a 3D seismic survey was conducted by Horizon Exploration Ltd. over the Fardume mound on northern Gotland. To date no results from these 3D data have been published in scientific literature. The region of Gotland aims to produce 100% of its energy from renewable sources and currently much of Gotland's electricity is provided by wind turbines. Due to the intermittent nature of wind power, one solution to regulate the supply of electricity from wind energy is Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES). In this study, we convert the 3D seismic survey acquired over the Fardume mound from scanned TIFF images to SEGY format. These data are then utilized together with well data to gain a better knowledge of the geological structure of the mound and to examine its reservoir characteristics and potential for CAES. To date, carbonate mounds on Gotland have mainly been reported in the scientific literature using well data. This 3D seismic survey, therefore, provides a rare opportunity to better characterize and investigate the structure of one of the carbonate mounds on Gotland. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.