The exploration and development of unconventional shales have focused on predominantly marine deposits, and the potential of hypersaline, restricted marine and lacustrine deposits have not been studied systematically. The primary goal for this study is to resolve if there are seismic indicators for such rocks within a predominantly marine shale, focusing on the Woodford Shale formation in Oklahoma. Several of the North American resource shales have been characterized as marine sequences with the common characteristic of being deposited above a carbonate formation where paleo sea level fluctuations allowed the development of erosional topography that might lead to restricted hypersaline lacustrine settings. The differences in hydrocarbon generation and cracking kinetics result in different thermal maturity windows for marine and saline lacustrine deposits, where lacustrine rocks require higher thermal maturity for oil generation. Therefore, where high thermal maturity for the marine rocks crack the oil, that same maturity yield for the lacustrine deposits the oil might be preserved, thus providing previously unidentified exploration and prospectivity targets. A model based post-stack acoustic impedance inversion and a supervised neural network was performed to predict the Total Organic Carbon (TOC) variation along the woodford shale. The results are tied with the regional context of the identificaion of geological variations and potentials of the potential lacustrine zones.
Presentation Date: Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Start Time: 1:50 PM
Location: 330A
Presentation Type: ORAL
