Assessment of the Cenozoic Erosion Amount Using Monte Carlo Type-Petroleum Systems Modeling of the Hammerfest Basin, Western Barents Sea

TheCenozoic uplift and erosion is often believed to be a major risk factor inhydrocarbon exploration in the Barents Sea causing petroleum redistribution andleakage from filled traps. Therefore, the estimation of erosion amount is animportant but often underrepresented task in the basin modeling procedure. Theassessment of erosion magnitudes and spatial distribution by geochemical andthermo chronological methods results in very different estimates and/or doesnot consider uncertainties of input data. In this study, this problem isapproached by using Monte Carlo simulation techniques in secondary migrationbasin modeling. Thereby, amounts of early and late Cenozoic erosion episodesare described by probability distributions and the modeling results wereevaluated considering their uncertainty ranges. In addition, overpressure andrelated leakage scenarios are considered in the petroleum basin models to studytheir effect on modeling results. It is shown that the early Cenozoic erosionevent had a generally higher erosion magnitude than the late Cenozoic event(1.0-1.3 and 0.4-1.2 km respectively). Modeled erosion estimates are not verysensitive to overpressure modeling which is found to affect only the earlyCenozoic erosion amount estimates at low degree.