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Structurally controlled hydrothermal alteration of carbonate reservoirs: Introduction

¹ Reservoir Characterization Group, New York State Museum, Room 3140 CEC, Albany, New York 12230; lsmith@mail.nysed.gov
² Graham Davies Geological Consultants, Ltd., Alastair Ross Technology Centre, 3553–31st Street NW, Calgary, Alberta T2L 2K7; gdgc@telus.net

Langhorne "Taury" Smith heads the Reservoir Characterization Group at the New York State Museum. He holds a B.S. degree from Temple University, a Ph.D. from Virginia Tech, and did postdoctoral work at the University of Miami. He also worked for Chevron as a development geologist, and current research interests are focused on carbonate reservoir characterization and hydrothermal alteration of carbonate reservoirs.

Graham Davies received his B.Sc. (honors) degree and Ph.D. from the University of Western Australia. His doctoral thesis was on modern carbonates in Shark Bay, Western Australia (published in AAPG Memoir 13). After a postdoctoral fellowship with James Lee Wilson at Rice University, he joined the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) in Calgary. After 7 years with the GSC, Graham co-founded and became principal owner of AGAT (Applied Geoscience and Technology) Consultants/Laboratories. Since 1983, he has operated through GDGC Ltd. He has published about 70 papers on the geology of Australia and Canada, and has authored or coauthored more than 600 consulting reports. Graham received the CSPG Douglas Medal in 2002 for his work on Arctic Paleozoic carbonates and evaporites, and on the Triassic and other aspects of western Canadian geology. His principal current interest is in hydrothermal dolomites.

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

	INTRODUCTION

 
This issue of the AAPG Bulletin is dedicated to structurally controlled hydrothermal alteration of carbonate rocks and reservoirs. This type of alteration covers the spectrum of carbonate-hosted sulfide ore deposits to hydrothermal dolomite to leached limestones, and in many cases has a major impact on reservoir type, geometry, quality, and distribution. Hydrothermal dolomite (HTD) reservoirs have a long history of exploration and development in North America, extending from the earliest discoveries in the Ordovician Lima-Indiana and other trends of the northeastern United States (Hurley and Budros, 1990; Wickstrom et al., 1992), and continuing today with the Trenton–Black River play and other hosts in the Michigan and northern Appalachian basins of the northeastern United States and eastern Canada.

Cumulatively, the existing and expanding evidence indicates that many carbonate reservoirs on a global scale were either formed or modified (positively or negatively in terms of reservoir quality) by structurally controlled hydrothermal fluids flowing up episodically active faults.

In western Canada, extensive reserves have been proven in Devonian and Mississippian HTD reservoirs. Significantly, the well-known wrench-localized Devonian Ladyfern discovery and field development in western Canada is a classic example of the combination of HTD and leached limestone reservoir facies (Boreen and Colquhoun, 2001; Boreen and Davies, 2004). The Devonian Jean Marie play in western Canada also demonstrates an association between structurally controlled, leached limestone reservoir development and HTD (Wendte et al., 2006).

Structurally influenced carbonate reservoirs with a close association between leached limestones and HTD have now been documented for the rifted North Atlantic margin (Wierzbicki et al., 2006, this volume). Structurally localized leached limestones occur along the southern Atlantic margins and Venezuela (Pöppelreiter et al., 2005). Published data and emerging evidence suggest that the world’s largest oil and gas fields . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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