Vaca Muerta — subsurface mapping experience.

Overview

Vaca Muerta is the world's second-largest shale oil resource by USGS assessed volume and Argentina's economic lifeline — a late Jurassic / early Cretaceous marine shale across the Neuquén Basin covering roughly 30,000 km² of prospective acreage. YPF, Vista, Pluspetrol, and a growing roster of international operators are now producing from the play at commercial scale.

The basin has three defining characteristics from a pre-drill standpoint: (1) stacked producing windows (oil, wet-gas, dry-gas) that vary laterally across the basin, (2) strongly heterogeneous sweet-spot distribution within each window, and (3) growing infrastructure and takeaway capacity that's finally making commercial development economically tractable at scale.

Remote NMR mapping has been deployed in Vaca Muerta for hydrocarbon window zonation, sweet-spot identification, and acquisition diligence on acreage transactions in the basin's steadily-consolidating M&A market.

Mapping considerations

Key characteristics influencing remote mapping:

• Strong window stratification. Oil, wet-gas, and dry-gas windows are mappable across the basin at regional scale, with boundaries shifting by tens of kilometres depending on burial history and thermal maturity.
• Mature well data. Calibration against hundreds of horizontal wells drilled since 2012 gives strong regional signature anchoring.
• Regionally heterogeneous TOC. Total organic carbon ranges from 2% to 10%+ across the basin. Sweet spots cluster around the higher-TOC fairways.
• Complex overburden. Basalt flows and evaporite sequences above the target in some sub-basins complicate interpretation but are manageable with proper calibration.

Typical use cases in this basin

• Hydrocarbon window zonation (oil / wet-gas / dry-gas boundaries)
• Sweet-spot mapping within productive windows
• Lateral landing target selection within identified sweet spots
• Acquisition diligence on M&A transactions
• Pad siting and development sequencing in new acreage