Unconventional petroleum deposits

Unconventional deposits are natural forms of oil that have such high viscosities and densities that
they are no longer "fluid."

"Unconventional" refers to naturally occurring oil or gas deposits of potentially commercial

significance that are unrecoverable by conventional drilling methods.

TWO main groups:

Bitumen family

-- Oil shale
-- Oil sands
Hydrates

Natural gas in the presence of water at low temperatures forms clathrates and becomes effectively a
solid (methane hydrates).
Oil Sands
(formerly “tar sands”)

USGS definition: “Any consolidated or unconsolidated rock that contains a hydrocarbon material
with a gas-free viscosity, measured at reservoir temperature, greater than 10,000 mPa, or that
contains a hydrocarbon material that is extractable from the mined or quarried rock.”

(This definition excludes coals, oil shales, and solid bitumens.)

They are commonly present at shallow depths (< 600 m) and not far above major unconformities.

Many deposits represent the outcropping parts of conventional oil reservoirs.

Heavy oil sands contain equally heavy oil, but are exploitable with the aid of artificial stimulation -
usually cyclic steam injection (steam soak) under pressure.

Surface and near-surface bituminous sands

Most bituminous sands are found in:

ß Venezuela - Orinoco oil belt

ß Alberta - Athabasca oil sands
ß Russia (Siberia) -- Olenek oil sands,

Olenek deposits are in remote Siberia:

ß Permian sandstones
ß Heavy oil: 1011 m3

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 ß Unlikely to be exploited

Orinoco oil (or tar) belt of eastern Venezuela is probably the largest continuous accumulation of
oil in the world

- 600 km long by ~ 50 km wide;

- net pay thickness: 40-80 m
- 180 and 1800 m depths
- 1.2 X 1011 m3
- 6 X 1011 m3 recoverable

These oils have API Gravity of 8-12°, but low viscosity - few thousand millipascal-seconds – they
are heavy oil rather than “oil sands”

They are exploited from conventional wells with the assistance of injected steam.

Athabasca oil sands

"The world's largest self-contained accumulation of hydrocarbons."

It is a single, discrete accumulation in a single reservoir rock (unlike Orinoco).

Oil is in Lower Cretaceous sandstones (McMurray Formation) that rest unconformably on

Devonian limestones and evaporites.

Characteristics of the sandstone:

ß clean, well sorted (~35% porosity)

ß quartzose, mainly uncemented
ß 50-80 m thick
ß ~20 m saturated with “tar”
ß locally up to 20 wt % bitumen (outcrop richest grades)
ß interstratified bitumen beds up to 50 cm thick

ß Lower part of the reservoir sandstone is an alluvial complex

ß Upper part consists of tidal flat and lower delta plain deposits

Overall reservoir complex is therefore coastal and transgressive, mainly non-marine, but with
marine components at the top.

Highest oil saturations are in fluvial and tidal channel sands

The "tar" is an asphaltic residuum of about 10.5° API gravity.

Oil is wrapped as a coating around individual, water-wet sand grains:

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 “The extraction problem is not of getting the oil out of the sand but of getting the sand out of the
oil”

Origin of the oil

(still not fully resolved)

First described in 1884, first worked about 1921.

Discussion has focused around three points:

• Is the "tar" immature oil or degraded oil?

• What was its source rock(s)?

• How did it get into its present reservoir as a coating on its grains instead of a filling of its
pore spaces?

Immature oil?

Ball: Highly immature "protopetroleum" lacking natural cracking to make it mature ()

Low level thermal maturation has been confirmed – but does not account for all the characteristics
of the "tar"

Corbett: Tar's state is original, and due to in situ generation by humic acids from superabundant
land vegetation delivered to the coal-generating Cretaceous delta . . . (unlikely)

Senile (old) oil?

Most geologists consider the oil to be senile, having undergone

• biodegradation (bacterial)
• water washing
• inspissation (drying out)
• some oxidation

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Effects become more pronounced updip: from heavy oils in Cretaceous basin to immobilized "tars"
of the Athabasca deposit.

Geochemical problems . . .

-- high concentration of unstable compounds suggest that the oil in its present form has not been
extensively weathered, evaporated, or polymerized.

Migration and source rock problems

The oil has undergone long lateral migration (÷) . . . but how much vertical migration?

Early workers suggested a Devonian source rock (subcrop of Devonian shales)

Gussow: oil sands are a gigantic stratigraphic trap, containing oil that had migrated from post-
Devonian, but pre-Cretaceous, rocks formerly occupying most of the Alberta Basin?

Geochemically, oil sand oil is like other Cretaceous oils but unlike Devonian oils in the Alberta
Basin -- little paraffins, more cycloparaffins and aromatics than Devonian oils

Vigrass proposed long migration from Cretaceous shale sources far to the west, preferentially
directed around barriers on which no Lower Cretaceous sandstones were deposited

Problems …

• Most post-Jurassic shales have low TOC – mainly of Type III

• None of the shales in the E have ever reached generative maturity.
• These shales have to have generated oil volume equivalent to all known conventional oils
and have survived migration across the basin. . . ??

How did the oil migrate?

Improbable: single-phase flow (too far?)

continuous kerogen network

Possible: micellar solution?

water? (theoretically possible)

What if oil is pre-Cretaceous (despite geochemical problems)?

The "tar" cannot have migrated > 100 km in present state

Thus inferences based on present chemistry are suspect

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Did oil originate in pre-Cretaceous source sediments in the west, and migrate towards the foreland
before the first Cretaceous sediments were deposited?

The truncated Devonian reservoir might then lose the oil as seepage droplets into the newly formed
Cretaceous lake and shallow sea; the droplets adhered to sand grains in a developing fluvial- deltaic
coastal complex, and were deposited as part of the sediment:

Thus no heavy, viscous oil has "migrated".

PROBLEMS!

Survival of oil below an erosion surface that was developed over 150 Ma before final burial

Experimentally impossible to get viscous asphaltic oil to adhere to sand grains in an aqueous
environment…
Recent geochemical studies

(Fowler et al. 2001)

• Biomarkers favour a single major source rock for all the heavy oils
• Same source rock also was source of many Carboniferous, Jurassic and Cretaceous
conventional oils in WCSB
• Biomarkers also characterize Late Devonian – Mississippian Exshaw Formation (Bakken)
• Biodegradation is variable – but increases W to E in Cretaceous
• Migration may have been pre-Cretaceous in northern areas

Settings for giant oil-sand deposits

Reservoir sands are widespread, fluvial - deltaic- coastal complexes deposited between emergent
landmasses and large, offshore sedimentary basins – large source areas
Between source and reservoir are extensive, interfingering, permeable carrier sandstones, little
interrupted by faults

The carrier beds and the reservoir bed occupy a simple homoclinal slope with updip stratigraphic
convergence towards the edge of the basin.

An equally widespread regional seal, commonly transgressive marine shale, must follow the
extensive development of the reservoir rock.

This permits long-duration, long-distance migration of the oil, focused towards a single target
reservoir at the updip extremity of permeability.

Migration is facilitated by an updip hydrodynamic gradient towards the foreland:

If maintained, much of the oil may be driven completely out of all traps and into a tar mat at the
surface

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If the hydrodynamic gradient weakens, meteoric waters encroach upon the oil-filled reservoir rock
from foreland outcrops, causing degradation of the oil and sealing the accumulation with asphalt.