SaltDOME STORAGE AND DRILLING HAZARDS IN THE ARABIAN GULF

The Arabian Gulf Basin holds one of the largest and oldest mobilized evaporite systems on Earth: Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian Hormuz and Ara salt has generated hundreds of diapirs, domes, and emergent plugs. These structures are now candidate sites for hydrogen and compressed-gas caverns while continuing to complicate drilling operations, yet the engineering-grade characterization that underpins storage qualification in Europe has no Gulf counterpart on open record. Geologic® prepared a review that closes the method side of this gap: a synthesis of eleven characterization techniques, from reflection seismology to satellite geodesy, each evaluated against Gulf conditions.

The review makes three contributions. A method-selection matrix links each technique to the salt problems it can and cannot resolve, with an uncertainty taxonomy separating data limits, interpretation bias, and scale mismatch. A named-structure gap map measures nine Gulf structure families against European cavern-qualification standards and finds the chain publicly incomplete everywhere, with the Jebel Al Dhanna and coastal Abu Dhabi cluster closest to closure. And a five-stage, gate-based screening workflow — offered explicitly as a proposal awaiting validation — treats the four salt drilling-hazard classes (creep closure, flank rubble, sealed overpressure, dissolution voids) as forecastable design inputs.