Publications

No abstract available.

For the San Joaquin Basin Province in California (fig. 8.1), six petroleum systems were identified, mapped, and described to provide the basis for the five total petroleum systems (TPS) and ten related assessment units (AU) used in the 2003 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Oil and Gas Assessment (table 8.1; Gautier and others, 2004; Hosford Scheirer, 2007). The petroleum pools in...

The Orinoco Oil Belt Assessment Unit of the La Luna-Quercual Total Petroleum System encompasses approximately 50,000 km2 of the East Venezuela Basin Province that is underlain by more than 1 trillion barrels of heavy oil-in-place. As part of a program directed at estimating the technically recoverable oil and gas resources of priority petroleum basins worldwide, the U.S. Geological...

Pore-throat sizes in silidclastic rocks form a continuum from the submillimeter to the nanometer scale. That continuum is documented in this article using previously published data on the pore and pore-throat sizes of conventional reservoir rocks, tight-gas sandstones, and shales. For measures of central tendency (mean, mode, median), pore-throat sizes (diameters) are generally greater...

Elastic velocities and hydraulic permeability of gas hydrate-bearing sediments strongly depend on how gas hydrate accumulates in pore spaces and various gas hydrate accumulation models are proposed to predict physical property changes due to gas hydrate concentrations. Elastic velocities and permeability predicted from a cementation model differ noticeably from those from a pore-filling...

Elastic velocities of water-saturated sandstones depend primarily on porosity, effective pressure, and the degree of consolidation. If the dry-frame moduli are known, from either measurements or theoretical calculations, the effect of pore water on velocities can be modeled using the Gassmann theory. Kuster and Toksoz developed a theory based on wave-scattering theory for a variety of...

Gas-hydrate resource assessment on the Alaska North Slope using 3-D and 2-D seismic data involved six important steps: (1) determining the top and base of the gas-hydrate stability zone, (2) 'tying' well log information to seismic data through synthetic seismograms, (3) differentiating ice from gas hydrate in the permafrost interval, (4) developing an acoustic model for the reservoir and...

Using a geology-based assessment method, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated mean undiscovered volumes of 3.8 billion barrels of undiscovered oil, 3.7 trillion cubic feet of associated/dissolved natural gas, and 0.2 billion barrels of undiscovered natural gas liquids in the Williston Basin Province, North Dakota, Montana, and South Dakota. (See “Introduction” in Fact Sheet for...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) recently completed the first assessment of the undiscovered technically recoverable gas-hydrate resources on the North Slope of Alaska. Using a geology-based assessment methodology, the USGS estimates that there are about 85 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of undiscovered, technically recoverable gas resources within gas hydrates in northern Alaska.

This guidebook includes papers on various aspects of resource evaluation, exploration, petrophysics, reservoir potential, well deliverability and drilling and completion technology. As new shale plays are explored for and developed, it is important to learn from analogs and case histories, including those from outside the Rocky Mountain region. While the emphasis is on natural gas, we...

No abstract available.

An area between the towns of Winnemucca and Battle Mountain in northwestern Nevada, termed the arkosic triangle, includes the type areas of the middle to upper Paleozoic Inskip Formation and Havallah sequence, the Upper Devonian to Mississippian Harmony Formation, the Sonoma orogeny, and the Golconda thrust. According to an extensive body of scientific literature, the Havallah sequence...