RE: ill Wind30 Aug 2019 13:39
worth a read after boogying to George.
A Brookian tale unfolds
Offshore, onshore, far and wide, Brookian source rocks focus of USGS assessment
Steve Sutherlin
Petroleum News
When Dave Houseknecht and the U.S. Geological Survey field party went into the field in summer 2019, it was to assess undiscovered oil and gas resources on North Slope state lands between the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Those state lands are vast, but not as vast as the Brookian source rocks that cross the Slope from NPR-A to the border of Canada and beyond, to the north and to the northeast, encompassing state, federal and Canadian offshore lands.
Senior research geologist Houseknecht and a multi-disciplinary team from the USGS gathered clues from Brookian source rocks, seeking out available well cores, outcrops, seismic data, geochemical testing and the like for an integrated database designed to more finely model the system, and how it interacts with reservoirs in the region.
The Brookian is the special focus of the USGS study - launched under a secretarial order signed May 2017 by former U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke. Zinke directed the USGS to do a whole series of updated assessments; this - when released in January, will be the second in that series.
Breakthrough of understanding
“We mainly focused on source rocks, reservoir rocks and the occurrence of oil,” Houseknecht said. “One of my colleagues, Kate Whidden, is leading our source rock analysis in particular. She and several other people have focused on the Brookian source rocks all the way across the North Slope, this year focusing on the area from Umiat all the way to the Canning River. That work includes age dating with uranium-lead analysis of zircon grains from volcanic ash beds, so we have a well-established set of ages for the Brookian source rocks; some of that work in the east was done the last two years, in and near ANWR,” he said. “That was the subject of a poster that Kate presented at the AAPG national meeting this year, (soon) to be released in the AAPG search and discovery series.”
The poster will include the ages the team has established, a lot of source rock richness, and a bit of the thermal maturity, Houseknecht said.
“The real breakthrough is that we’ve been able to correlate the different members within the Brookian source rock interval with well logs.” he said. “We’ve got some people who are measuring spectral gamma ray in the outcrop and that enables us to correlate outcrops, to gamma ray logs in exploration wells and to seismic data across the North Slope.
“That’s a real breakthrough, I think, in understanding the Brookian source rock,” Houseknecht said. “Obviously that work is only partially done, but we’re making a lot of progress, and that work will be published over the next few years as all the results are finished up.”
The picture sharpens
“We had another crew wor