Gravimetria e exploração de petróleo na Bacia de Santos

Abstract

The Santos basin is one of the biggest sedimentary basins in Brazil. It's a passive margin basin that derives from the Gondwana separation occured in the Neocomian. In respect to the hydrocarbons exploration, the Santos basin is underexplorated, once its petrolific potential is great and there are few producing drills and few exploratory research, if compared to the Campos basin and others petrolific areas around the world. Because of its carachteristics, the basin has and elevated potential in gas production, being in the core of concerns of the brazilian government, ANP and all companies. The gravimetric method is very useful in geophysical and geological studies of the undersurface. It's based in the theory of gravity and after all the process of aquiring, processing and interpretation of data, it's possible to identify gravimetric anomalies that tells a lot about the geology of an area. The gravimetry is used, normally, to a first analysis of a petrolific region of interest and, in case of a good perspective, the use of others techniques are recomended. In two cases involving gravimetry, it's seen that De Mio (2005) used the gravimetric method parallel to others geophysical methods to modelate the crust in some lines of the Santos basin. Yalamanchili and Neuwenhuise (2002) did used the gravimetry and the magnetics to map structures with large salt and volcanic masses and improve the seismic surveys planning.