The specific technical objectives of the study are: To provide a consistent, state of the art, geochemical database of a wide range of oils from across the Gulf of Suez. Industry standard analyses have been selected in order to both fully characterize the hydrocarbon to integrate the data from this study with pre-existing data and to incorporate future data. The analyses to be performed will include the more routine, oil standard techniques and also the more recent detailed analyses that represent the latest developments in geochemistry. The analytical programme is extensive, and is designed to provide the necessary compositional data to accomplish detailed oil/oil correlations and, if required, oil/ source correlations