New Albany Shale | |
---|---|
Stratigraphic range: Devonian-Mississippian | |
Type | Formation |
Sub-units | Blocher, Camp Run, Clegg Creek, Lower Blackiston, Morgan Trail & Selmier members |
Underlies | Hannibal Shale & Rockford Limestone |
Overlies | Boyle Formation, North Vernon, Sellersburg & Sylamore Limestones |
Lithology | |
Primary | Shale |
Other | Dolomite, limestone, phosphorite |
Location | |
Coordinates | 38°42′N85°42′W / 38.7°N 85.7°W |
Approximate paleocoordinates | 27°00′S33°54′W / 27.0°S 33.9°W |
Region | Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky |
Country | United States |
Extent | Illinois Basin |
Type section | |
Named for | New Albany, Indiana |
The New Albany Shale is an organic-rich geologic formation of Devonian and Mississippian age in the Illinois Basin of the United States. It is a major source of hydrocarbons.
The New Albany formation consists of brown, black, and green shale with minor beds of dolomite and sandstone. It was deposited under anoxic marine conditions. Pyrite is a common accessory mineral, and parts of the shale have greater than 4% by weight of organic carbon. The black shale layers have anomalously high radioactivity (due to uranium), phosphorus, and heavy metals. [2] The formation was named for outcrops near New Albany, Indiana. It is one of a number of organic-rich shales of upper Devonian and lower Mississippian age in North America. It is correlative with the Antrim Shale of the Michigan Basin, the Ohio Shale of Ohio and eastern Kentucky, and the Chattanooga Shale of Tennessee and central Kentucky.
The formation is composed of six members. These members in ascending stratigraphic order are the Blocher, the Selmier, the Morgan Trail, the Camp Run, the Clegg Creek and the Ellsworth. The Blocher consists of brownish-black to grayish-black, slightly calcareous pyritic shale. The Selmier is a greenish-gray to olive-gray shale. The Morgan Trail is a brownish-black to olive-black fissile siliceous pyritic shale. The Camp Run is a greenish-gray to olive-gray shale interbedded with brownish-black shale. The Clegg Creek is a brownish black pyritic shale that is rich in organic matter. The Ellsworth is composed of a lower part of interbedded brownish-black shale and an upper part of greenish-gray shale. [3]
Natural gas is produced from wells completed in the New Albany Shale in the southern part of the basin in Indiana and western Kentucky. As of 2001, technically recoverable shale gas in the New Albany was estimated to be between 1.9 and 19.2 trillion cubic feet. [4] More recently reserves have been estimated as high as 160 trillion cubic feet. [5]
The New Albany Shale is also a major deposit of oil shale. The Eastern Devonian shale has been estimated to contain 189,000 106 bbls of oil. [6]
The formation is also thought to be the source rock of petroleum found in Devonian and Silurian formations in the basin. [7] It is hypothesized that the long-distance migration of oil from the New Albany Shale into surrounding sandstones was caused by orogenies occurring to the east. These orogenies caused periods of uplift and subsidence that influenced movement of the hydrocarbons in the Illinois Basin. [8]
The Permian Basin is a large sedimentary basin in the southwestern part of the United States. It is the highest producing oil field in the United States, producing an average of 4.2 million barrels of crude oil per day in 2019. This sedimentary basin is located in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico.
The Acadian orogeny is a long-lasting mountain building event which began in the Middle Devonian, reaching a climax in the Late Devonian. It was active for approximately 50 million years, beginning roughly around 375 million years ago (Ma), with deformational, plutonic, and metamorphic events extending into the early Mississippian. The Acadian orogeny is the third of the four orogenies that formed the Appalachian Mountains and subsequent basin. The preceding orogenies consisted of the Grenville and Taconic orogenies, which followed a rift/drift stage in the Neoproterozoic. The Acadian orogeny involved the collision of a series of Avalonian continental fragments with the Laurasian continent. Geographically, the Acadian orogeny extended from the Canadian Maritime provinces migrating in a southwesterly direction toward Alabama. However, the northern Appalachian region, from New England northeastward into Gaspé region of Canada, was the most greatly affected region by the collision.
The San Juan Basin is a geologic structural basin located near the Four Corners region of the Southwestern United States. The basin covers 7,500 square miles and resides in northwestern New Mexico, southwestern Colorado, and parts of Utah and Arizona. Specifically, the basin occupies space in the San Juan, Rio Arriba, Sandoval, and McKinley counties in New Mexico, and La Plata and Archuleta counties in Colorado. The basin extends roughly 100 miles (160 km) N-S and 90 miles (140 km) E-W.
Oil shale geology is a branch of geologic sciences which studies the formation and composition of oil shales–fine-grained sedimentary rocks containing significant amounts of kerogen, and belonging to the group of sapropel fuels. Oil shale formation takes place in a number of depositional settings and has considerable compositional variation. Oil shales can be classified by their composition or by their depositional environment. Much of the organic matter in oil shales is of algal origin, but may also include remains of vascular land plants. Three major type of organic matter (macerals) in oil shale are telalginite, lamalginite, and bituminite. Some oil shale deposits also contain metals which include vanadium, zinc, copper, and uranium.
The Williston Basin is a large intracratonic sedimentary basin in eastern Montana, western North Dakota, South Dakota, southern Saskatchewan, and south-western Manitoba that is known for its rich deposits of petroleum and potash. The basin is a geologic structural basin but not a topographic depression; it is transected by the Missouri River. The oval-shaped depression extends approximately 475 miles (764 km) north-south and 300 miles (480 km) east-west.
The Hamilton Group is a Devonian-age geological group which is located in the Appalachian region of the United States. It is present in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, West Virginia, northwestern Virginia and Ontario, Canada, and is mainly composed of marine shale with some sandstone.
The Bend Arch–Fort Worth Basin Province is a major petroleum producing geological system which is primarily located in North Central Texas and southwestern Oklahoma. It is officially designated by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) as Province 045 and classified as the Barnett-Paleozoic Total Petroleum System (TPS).
The Devonian Mahantango Formation is a mapped bedrock unit in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Maryland. It is named for the North branch of the Mahantango Creek in Perry and Juniata counties in Pennsylvania. It is a member of the Hamilton Group, along with the underlying the Marcellus Formation Shale. South of Tuscarora Mountain in south central Pennsylvania, the lower members of this unit were also mapped as the Montebello Formation. Details of the type section and of stratigraphic nomenclature for this unit as used by the U.S. Geological Survey are available on-line at the National Geologic Map Database.
The Marcellus Formation or the Marcellus Shale is a Middle Devonian age unit of sedimentary rock found in eastern North America. Named for a distinctive outcrop near the village of Marcellus, New York, in the United States, it extends throughout much of the Appalachian Basin.
In petroleum geology, source rock is rock which has generated hydrocarbons or which could generate hydrocarbons. Source rocks are one of the necessary elements of a working petroleum system. They are organic-rich sediments that may have been deposited in a variety of environments including deep water marine, lacustrine and deltaic. Oil shale can be regarded as an organic-rich but immature source rock from which little or no oil has been generated and expelled. Subsurface source rock mapping methodologies make it possible to identify likely zones of petroleum occurrence in sedimentary basins as well as shale gas plays.
The Illinois Basin is a Paleozoic depositional and structural basin in the United States, centered in and underlying most of the state of Illinois, and extending into southwestern Indiana and western Kentucky. The basin is elongate, extending approximately 400 miles (640 km) northwest-southeast, and 200 miles (320 km) southwest-northeast.
The Bedford Shale is a shale geologic formation in the states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia in the United States.
The Antrim Shale is a formation of Upper Devonian age in the Michigan Basin, in the US state of Michigan, and extending into Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin. It is a major source of natural gas in the northern part of the basin.
The Beaverhill Lake Group is a geologic unit of Middle Devonian to Late Devonian age in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin that is present in the southwestern Northwest Territories, northeastern British Columbia and Alberta. It was named by the geological staff of Imperial Oil in 1950 for Beaverhill Lake, Alberta, based on the core from a well that they had drilled southeast of the lake, near Ryley, Alberta.
The Phosphoria Formation of the western United States is a geological formation of Early Permian age. It represents some 15 million years of sedimentation, reaches a thickness of 420 metres (1,380 ft) and covers an area of 350,000 square kilometres (140,000 sq mi).
The Cleveland Shale, also referred to as the Cleveland Member, is a shale geologic formation in the eastern United States.
The Albert Formation is a stratigraphic unit of Early Mississippian (Tournaisian) age in the Moncton Subbasin of southeastern New Brunswick. It was deposited in a lacustrine environment and includes fossils of fish and land plants, as well as trace fossils. It also includes significant deposits of oil shale. The oil shale beds are the source rocks for the petroleum and natural gas that has been produced from Albert Formation reservoirs at the Stoney Creek and McCully fields. In addition, the solid asphalt-like hydrocarbon albertite was mined from the Albert Formation at Albert Mines between 1854 and 1884.
The geology of Kentucky formed beginning more than one billion years ago, in the Proterozoic eon of the Precambrian. The oldest igneous and metamorphic crystalline basement rock is part of the Grenville Province, a small continent that collided with the early North American continent. The beginning of the Paleozoic is poorly attested and the oldest rocks in Kentucky, outcropping at the surface, are from the Ordovician. Throughout the Paleozoic, shallow seas covered the area, depositing marine sedimentary rocks such as limestone, dolomite and shale, as well as large numbers of fossils. By the Mississippian and the Pennsylvanian, massive coal swamps formed and generated the two large coal fields and the oil and gas which have played an important role in the state's economy. With interludes of terrestrial conditions, shallow marine conditions persisted throughout the Mesozoic and well into the Cenozoic. Unlike neighboring states, Kentucky was not significantly impacted by the Pleistocene glaciations. The state has extensive natural resources, including coal, oil and gas, sand, clay, fluorspar, limestone, dolomite and gravel. Kentucky is unique as the first state to be fully geologically mapped.
The Greater Green River Basin (GGRB) is a 21,000 square mile basin located in Southwestern Wyoming. The Basin was formed during the Cretaceous period sourced by underlying Permian and Cretaceous deposits. The GGRB is host to many anticlines created during the Laramide Orogeny trapping many of its hydrocarbon resources. It is bounded by the Rawlins Uplift, Uinta Mountains, Sevier overthrust belt, Sierra Madre Mountains, and the Wind River Mountain Range. The Greater Green River Basin is subdivided into four smaller basins, the Green River Basin, Great Divide Basin, Washakie Basin, and Sand Wash Basin. Each of these possesses hydrocarbons that have been economically exploited. There are 303 named fields throughout the basin, the majority of which produce natural gas; the largest of these gas fields is the Jonah Field.
The West Falls Group is a geologic group in the Appalachian Basin. It dates back to the Devonian period. Also stratigraphically equivalent to the Portage Group.