Smackover Formation

The most important of these is the Permian Basin. In the latter half of the Paleozoic era, sediments rich in organic matter accumulated here when a shallow sea got cut off from the main oceans and evaporated off, leaving lots of dead critters and evaporites. These sediments eventually got buried and compressed, causing the oil and gas to form "pockets in permeable rock, surrounded by impermeable rocks so that they couldn't escape. There the fluid sits until someone pokes a hole (well) into the area and the contents rush out as the tremendous pressure is released. Other areas of Texas with notable petroleum sources include East Texas's Woodbine Formation (formed in the Late Cretaceous), much of the Gulf Coast and the Gulf itself, and various smaller pockets in South and South Central Texas.

Petroleum is created over millions of years from dead alagae that goes to the bottom of the ocean and is buried beneath the surface.

This formation is a very fine grain Mississippian limestone. To test to see if this was the Bangor formation we used HCL and because there was a reaction we know its limestone. This formation could also be described as gray in color as well as an average thickness of 700 feet. We see the Bangor until stop eight, where we see a very different vertical bedding. Also different at stop eight is the outcrop no longer reacts with HCL. From this we gathered that we had moved into the Hartselle formation. In the Hartselle Formation, Mississippian aged sandstones are dominant. This particular stop had a large amount of jointing. After the Hartselle, we figured the Pride Mountain Formation would be next, however at stop nine we see the Maury Formation present. This stop focused on the rock located inside the creek. Because we were unable to go into the creek to get the strike and dips, we once again had to do a projected orientation. Also found on this stop were natural sulfur springs, easy to notice with the smell that it gives off. The Maury formation consist of Mississippian- Silurian aged shale. At the next stop, stop 10, we encounter the Ft. Payne formation. Although this area location was thickly vegetated, we were able to conduct the acid test and saw that the HCL reacts in some places but not all. From this we concluded that this was the cherty limestone of the Ft. Payne formation. The following stop, 12, we went up section and arrived at the Maury Formation once again. At the final stop, location 13, we see Ft. Payne Formation. All of the metamorphism and deformation in the southernmost Appalachians can be related to the movement of the thrust sheets and stacks (Higgins,

The Arkoma Basin is one of several foreland basins that formed along the Ouachita Orogenic Belt during the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian time periods. It covers approximately 33,800 square miles and extends from southeastern Oklahoma to central Arkansas (Perry, 1997). The Arkoma Basin is bounded to the north by the Ozark Uplift, to the south by the Ouachita Mountains, to the northwest by the Anadarko Basin, to the southwest by the Arbuckle Uplift, and to the southeast by the Mississippian Embayment (Figure 5). The red box in figure 5 denotes the general location of the study area, which is in the eastern Arkoma section.

The process of making synthetic crude oil requires an enormous amount of water, especially in the separation process. Each barrel of oil requires two tons of oil sands and up to five barrels of hot water. Water is also needed along with electricity to convert it steam. The steam is pushed by steam injections making bitumen less viscous. It is quite evident that oil sands are not practical in terms of its process. Also three-quarters of the bitumen can be recovered from the sands, leaving behind 25% as waste. With the technology in our present society, oil sands are not entirely practical in terms of efficiency; however, in the future, this may change. To reflect, there are many disadvantages associated with oil sands, especially in the way it is processed.

Our third stop was along the interstate, right between two formations of Washita Valley. The formation on the north of us was represented by Pennsylvanian Collings Ranch Conglomerate (around 350 million years old), which is shown with blue color on the map and the formation on the south of us was represented by Ordovician Kindblade Limestone (around 450mil years old), shown by the pink color on the map. There is a huge time gap between these two formations. The Collings Ranch Conglomerate is outstandingly exposed along Interstate 35 near the top of Arbuckle Mountains. It was formed during late Pennsylvanian and is slightly younger than Devil’s Kitchen Conglomerate. Large size of grains, conglomerate boulders and cobbles, indicate high energy

At the intersection of Neva Road and U.S. 36 we examined three different members, the Smoky Hill, Fort Hayes, and Codell, which belong to two different formations, Niobrara and Benton. The Smoky Hill and Fort Hayes belong to the Niobrara formation while Codell belongs to the Benton Formation. In the Niobrara’s Smoky Hill and Benton, Inoceramid clam (giant clam) fossils were found. These three formations are of Late Cretaceous.

This geologic data has shown that the basin contains sedimentary rocks of Late Cambrian to the Tertiary age, and is more than 15,000 feet thick. The depo-center of the Williston Basin started its development during the early Paleozoic era in the northwestern part of North Dakota. The sedimentary rock thickness decreases to less than 10,000 feet in eastern Montana and to less than 5000 feet along the basin margin (Peterson & MacCary, 2009). Carbonate deposition occurred throughout the area during the early to middle Paleozoic era and changed to clastic deposition in the late Paleozoic era. During the Paleozoic era, more than 8000 feet of marine sediments accumulated at the basin center, but the shape of the basin remained the same. The basin depo-center has however shifted slightly over time. The Williston Basin sedimentation in the lower and middle Paleozoic is dominated by carbonates and evaporates, whereas upper Paleozoic and younger rocks are largely siliciclastic with small admixtures of carbonate (Anderson & Gerhard,

Besides the ideal physical structure for oil and gas reservoirs formed in the Gulf of Mexico, the nature also prepared all of other necessary conditions to form and accumulate oil and gas, such as organic source, pressure and temperature. According to the chemical and biological description, Oil is basically a mix of naturally occurring organic compounds from within the earth that contain primarily hydrogen, carbon and oxygen. Dead animals, algae and bacteria, which are considered as the fundamental source to form oil and gas, were absolutely abundant at the early Jurassic era, when the Gulf of Mexico basin was just well formed. After the death of living creatures such as animal and plants, most of their bodies are destroyed by bacteria. Some of these organic material settled down to the bottom of the seafloor, where there was no oxygen at all, being protected from the bacterial actions. Through certain chemical reaction, the leftover organic material mixed with sediments turned into a substance named Kerogen .

The Eagle Ford shale formation in south Texas has recently become the focus of many oil industry operators searching for new sources of hydrocarbons by using the latest technology in previously unexplored areas. This exploration enhances the development of even more advanced techniques as issues are identified and problems solved to address the unique properties of the formation and the surrounding surface environment. Even though a formation may be comprised of a single sedimentary layer from a similar geological time frame it is not a homogeneous block and has many features and anomalies that effect the pressure, permeability, type of hydrocarbons trapped and methods required to extract them. To understand these properties one must understand that shale is a fine-grained sedimentary rock that forms from the compaction of silt and clay placing it in the mudstone category of rocks [1]. Shale is different from other rocks in this category because it has a fissile structure and is laminated. The black shale in the Eagle Ford formation (Fig 1.) has a special property such that it contained organic material when it was deposited and during compaction over a millennium, the organic materials were converted into trapped oil and gas hydrocarbon deposits. This oil and gas are very difficult to remove because it is trapped within tiny pore spaces and or adsorbed onto clay mineral particles that makeup the shale.

The data and interpretation for this study were based upon a detailed petrographic examination of sixty (60) thin sections prepared from the core samples of the Kreyenhagen and Vedder sands from Mushrush wells 1, 2, and 5 of the Wasco oil field, California, and supplemented by textural and chemical analyses of twelve thin sections obtained using the scanning electron microscope (SEM) equipped with an energy-dispersive x-ray spectrophotometer (EDS). The thin sections were studied to establish the mineralogical, compositional, and textural properties of the Vedder and Kreyenhagen sandstones. The data collected were used to determine the diagenetic paragenesis including porosity development of the Vedder and Kreyenhagen sandstones of the Wasco oil field.

The Bakken Formation is a Late Devonian to Early Mississippian formation within the Williston Basin as seen below in Figure 1. To understand the process that formed the Bakken it is necessary to understand the formation of the Williston Basin as a whole. Figure 1 represents the stratigraphy of the Williston Basin. The Bakken Source Rock can be seen between the Devonian and the Mississippian contacts in this diagram. This figure also shows that the Williston Basin began subsiding in the Late Cambrian and continued to subside since then (Peterson, 1995). Also seen in Figure 1 is the Nesson Anicline that

Natural gas is one very important fossil fuel and from its various uses, its numbers have continued to dwindle. Supply and demand has taken a toll on this very precious commodity. Ordinary vertical drilling of natural gas has ceased to produce much and this once prevalent method may eventually end up becoming obsolete. In the 1990’s a different method that was being used, but wasn’t common, caught some attention and is called horizontal hydraulic fracturing or fracking for short. Since the method of fracking was first used in 1940, it has gradually changed and is now combined with a new strategy of drilling horizontally. This new way of drilling helps to reach vast amounts of previously inaccessible gases and oils that are stuck in shale. According to oil industries Devon energy, Chesapeake, and Halliburton’s estimates, around 827 million cubic feet of untapped gases and oils are under the U. S. but may not be as easily accessible as once thought (Mooney 80-85).

Tar/ Oil sands are very important for determining the energy requirements of any country. Today we highly depend on the energy resources and could not succeed without considerable energy resources available to us to meet our daily production needs. Fossil fuels which are based on coal, natural gas, renewable, nuclear and oil are the main sources of energy in this highly competitive world depending on these energy sources. The major part of the world’s energy needs is met by using fossil fuels which are proved to be the abundant sources of energy necessary for the development of modern

Purpose of the Website and Map: The purpose of this website is to catalog articles, documents, and dissertation published by the faculty of the UMN. This site has official, reviewed data collected by professionals in their area of expertise which makes it a reliable source of information. Even though the website is open to the public, much of the language used in the papers is highly academic and technical which would be more suited to an advanced audience or fellow researchers in the field. The map shows the bedrock distribution and type throughout the state, specifically focusing on the Precambrian and Phanerozoic eras. Some of the data is inferred from previous maps with the inclusion of newly discovered types that are indicated as