Sandstone Depositional Models For Exploration For Fossil Fuels

Sandstone Depositional Models for Exploration for Fossil Fuels

The purpose of this monograph is to provide participants in my various short courses with a brief statement of the material I cover in my lectures. In addition, key illustrations are reproduced for guidance. A brief bibliography of reference material is appended to each chapter. The bibliographic material includes those references that I consider critical to my remarks. No claim is made of topical or bibliographic completeness. This monograph also is intended as a brief summary of depositional processes, Holocene sediments, ancient counterparts of depositional environments, and examples of oil- and gas-bearing stratigraphic traps in five depositional environments. This summary is intended to complement lecture and reading courses dealing with sedimentology, depositional systems, sedimentary facies, sedimentary environments, sandstone diagenesis, and sedimentary modelling as a predictive tool for exploration. The student is cautioned, however, that this monograph is merely an introduction and summary overview of the subject. More complete treatments appear in standard textbooks. Sedimentology has changed and advanced over the past twenty-five years, in part because the American oil industry needed to make predictions about the occurrence of the harder-to-find stratigraphic traps. In addition, the development of plate-tectonic theory, and supportive data from the Deep Sea Drilling Project, have caused sedimentology to change from an essentially descriptive science to a mature, predictive science. The 1960s and 1970s in particular witnessed an explosion of new insights and understanding of how sediments are deposited, and how sedimentary rocks are formed.

Sandstone Depositional Models for Exploration for Fossil Fuels

Sand and Sandstone

The first edition appeared fourteen years ago. Since then there have been significant advances in our science that warrant an updating and revision of Sand and Sandstone. The main framework of the first edition has been retained so that the reader can begin with the mineralogy and textural properties of sands and sandstones, progress through their organization and classification and their study as a body of rock, to consideration of their origin-prove nance, transportation, deposition, and lithification-and finally to their place in the stratigraphic column and the basin. The last decade has seen the rise of facies analysis based on a closer look at the stratigraphic record and the recognition of characteristic bed ding sequences that are the signatures of some geologic process-such as a prograding shallow-water delta or the migration of a point bar on an alluvial floodplain. The environment of sand deposition is more closely determined by its place in such depositional systems than by criteria based on textural characteristics-the "fingerprint" approach. Our revi sion reflects this change in thinking. As in the geological sciences as a whole, the concept of plate tectonics has required a rethinking of our older ideas about the origin and accumu lation of sediments-especially the nature of the sedimentary basins.