Fugro Executes Seep Hunting for Petronas

Fugro has completed the first of three Malaysian seep hunting and geochemical campaigns for the provision of surface geochemical survey for domestic waters for Petronas.

The first project, offshore Sabah, Malaysia, began on 21 December 2018 aboard the Fugro Equator vessel, which acquired geophysical data including multibeam echosounder (MBES) and sub-bottom profiler (SBP) data used to interpret geologic features and optimise target selection for geochemical sampling.

Targeted coring operations and shipboard geochemical analyses started on 6 January 2019 aboard the Fugro Equinox vessel and was completed on 20 March 2019.

Over 6,600 square kilometres of MBES data comprised of bathymetry, backscatter intensity, and water column, approximately 2245 line kilometres of SBP data and 281 geochemical cores were acquired. Shipboard geochemical results for headspace gas, total scanning fluorescence and extracted hydrocarbon gas chromatography (C15+) were carried out on more than 550 samples taken from acquired cores.

Regarding the Sabah Project, Dr. Awang Sapawi Awang Jamil, Geochemist for Petronas stated, “The project team is happy with the technical support provided by Fugro on successfully completing the project within the agreed time-line and without any Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) incident. The receipt of geochemical analyses from the vessel was very helpful in de-risking our area of interest and in accelerating our project timeline by allowing earlier identification of samples to be sent for advanced geochemical analyses.”

The second seep hunting and geochemical campaign for Petronas began in May 2019 and is taking place offshore Sarawak, Malaysia whereas the third campaign will be focused off the Straits of Malacca, Malaysian peninsula in Q4 2019.