Investigations on the shale oil and gas potential of Westphalian mudstone successions in the Campine Basin, NE Belgium (well KB174): Palaeoenvironmental and palaeogeographical controls

1. IntroductionEuropean conventional natural gas reserves are depleting, which results in declining production curves. Consequently EU will become more dependent on the import of oil and gas than it is today (Soderbergh et al., 2009, 2010). On the other hand shale gas has become an important source of natural gas in the United States, feeding the economy, creating domestic jobs and improving the US energy balance. It is expected that the United States will be a net exporter of natural gas by 2030 (Paltsev et al., 2011: Manning, 2014). As a consequence, other countries in the world become interested in the domestic potential of unconventional oil and gas resources. Estimates for Europe’s technically recoverable shale gas volumes range between 3 and 18 trillion m3 (Tcm) (Weijermars, 2013) as compared to estimated world resources of 425 Tcm. The range reflects the inherent uncertainties of the estimates. Exploration is in progress in different EU Member States (e.g. United Kingdom, Poland, Hungary, Romania), or is taken into consideration (e.g. The Netherlands, Austria, Lithuania). These campaigns focused on marine black shales (Gasparik et al., 2012; Sachsenhofer & Koltun, 2012; Uffman et al., 2012; Andrews, 2013), following their success in the United States. The corresponding exploration target in Belgium is constrained to the Namurian aged Chokier Formation (Dusar, 2006; Nyhuis et al., 2014) (Fig. 1). The shale gas potential of the Namurian in the Campine Basin is poorly kno