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Author Topic:   Is deep age irrelevant?
bernd
Member (Idle past 3980 days)
Posts: 95
From: Munich,Germany
Joined: 07-10-2005


Message 1 of 2 (236273)
08-23-2005 9:11 PM


I would like to discuss a idea which Faith brought up, that deep age isn’t testable or provable in any way, which when applied to petrology leads to the claim (see [1],[2]):
Age is irrelevant to the task of finding oil by stratigraphic means
A demonstration that deep age is more than an ideological construct of mainstream geology can be found for example in basin modeling [3], a set of methods which is used by the oil industry for oil exploration. The problem is to get an adequate understanding of the potential of an assumed oil field with sparse input data - for example by drill holes or seismic measurements. That’s a bit like a puzzle: We have only some pieces at hand and try to guess the whole picture. But there is at least one important difference to solving a puzzle: a geological model does not simply generate a way to connect the dots, it tries to reconstruct the development of a sedimentary basin based on well known and quantifiable processes like conductive cooling, erosion, tectonic uplift, which in most cases require geological time spans.
An example would be the modeling of the thermal history of a basin, which covers the "magnitude of maximum paleotemperatures in individual samples", "the timing of cooling from maximum paleotemperatures" and the "style of timing" to name only the most important aspects. This information is used to determine the thermal maturity for source rocks - that are rocks which (possibly) generate petroleum - when direct measurements are not available. Maturation is the process whereby hydrocarbon is formed from kerogen. This important change occurs only when kerogen is subjected to high temperature over long periods of time. A simple way to model this behavior is to calculate a measure called TTI, the time-temperature index. It uses a time factor, which is the time interval for a certain temperature (in millions of years) and a temperature factor which increases exponential, by a factor of 2 for every 10C. By multiplying both factors one obtains a dimensionless number, the interval TTI, which represents the maturity acquired by the rock at given time interval and temperature. The total TTI is calculated by summing up incremental maturity values which when calculated over the whole time span gives a good measure for the overall maturity of the source rock. (see [4])
Maturity in combination with type and amount of the organic material present in a source rock (measured as TOC) gives a good indication whether drilling is recommendable or not. (see [5])
-Bernd
P.S.
Before deciding what to do about this post, please have a look at my request for clarification [6].


References
[1] Message 215
[2] Message 31
[3] Basin modelling - Wikipedia
[4] http://www.geo.vu.nl/...oil/oil-total-web.html#_Toc531067631
[5] http://www.geo.vu.nl/...oil/oil-total-web.html#_Toc531067623
[6] Message 24

AdminNosy
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Posts: 4754
From: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Joined: 11-11-2003


Message 2 of 2 (236680)
08-25-2005 4:09 AM


Thread copied to the Is deep age irrelevant? thread in the Dates and Dating forum, this copy of the thread has been closed.

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