Significance of Surface Lineaments for Gas and Oil Exploration in Part of Sabatayn Basin-Yemen

Sabatayn basin is one of the two mature basins producing oil and gas in Yemen. Due to the recent decline in oil
production, the exploration activities have been extensively concentrated mainly on these two basins (Sabatayn
and Sayun-Masilah). So, this present study has been conducted to evaluate the exploration potential of the
remaining trap areas within these mature basins. Fracture basement of reservoir becomes very attractive
exploration target in Yemen recently, after the recent discoveries of basement fracture oil fields. As the
evaluation of basement traps needs time and fund, to reduce the same, this research study uses a new technique
which was devised with the help of Geoinformatics by analyzing the surface and subsurface lineaments
effectively. In this study, a satellite image Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+7) based analysis was conducted
for extracting surface lineaments, and for the subsurface lineaments, the basement lineaments were extracted
from seismic, magnetic and gravity data. An orientation analysis of these surface and subsurface linear features
was performed to detect the basic structural grains of the study area. The correlation between these structural
grains and subsurface oil and gas traps was performed to understand the connectivity to the reservoirs. This
paper discusses in detail about the same and the importance of using surface and subsurface lineament analysis
for delineating hydrocarbon reservoirs in the study area.