Smackover Formation | |
---|---|
Stratigraphic range: Oxfordian | |
Type | Formation |
Underlies | Buckner Formation |
Overlies | Norphlet Formation |
Location | |
Region | Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida |
Country | United States |
The Smackover Formation is a geologic formation that extends under parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. [1] It preserves fossils dating back to the Jurassic period. The formation is a relic of an ancient sea that left an extensive, porous, and permeable limestone geologic unit.
The Smackover Formation consists of oolitic limestones and silty limestones. [2] [3]
The Smackover Formation has been a prolific source of petroleum. The 1922 discovery of the Smackover oil field, after which the Smackover Formation is named, resulted in a sizeable oil boom in southern Arkansas.[ citation needed ]
In addition to being a petroleum reservoir, as of 2015, the brine from the Smackover Formation is the only source of commercial bromine in the United States. [4]
A 2022 report estimated that the lithium brine in the formation has "sufficient lithium to produce enough batteries for 50 million electric vehicles." [5] In October 2024, federal and state researchers announced the formation may hold five to 19 million tons of lithium, which is about nine times the annual worldwide demand for electric vehicles projected for 2030. [6]
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 Morrison Formation is a distinctive sequence of Upper Jurassic sedimentary rock found in the western United States which has been the most fertile source of dinosaur fossils in North America. It is composed of mudstone, sandstone, siltstone, and limestone and is light gray, greenish gray, or red. Most of the fossils occur in the green siltstone beds and lower sandstones, relics of the rivers and floodplains of the Jurassic period.
The Wilcox Group is an important geologic group in the Gulf of Mexico Basin and surrounding onshore areas from Mexico and Texas to Louisiana and Alabama. The group ranges in age from Paleocene to Eocene and is in Texas subdivided into the Calvert Bluff, Simsboro and Hooper Formations, and in Alabama into the Nanafalia and Hatchetigbee Formations. Other subdivisions are the Lower, Middle and Upper Wilcox Subgroups, and the Carrizo and Indio Formations.
South Arkansas lies within the southernmost portions of Arkansas Gulf Coastal Plain and Delta regions. It encompasses the lower 15 counties of the state.
The East Texas Oil Field is a large oil and gas field in east Texas. Covering 140,000 acres (57,000 ha) and parts of five counties, and having 30,340 historic and active oil wells, it is the second-largest oil field in the United States outside Alaska, and first in total volume of oil recovered since its discovery in 1930. Over 5.42 billion barrels (862,000,000 m3) of oil have been produced from it to-date. It is a component of the Mid-continent oil field, the huge region of petroleum deposits extending from Kansas to New Mexico to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Michigan Basin is a geologic basin centered on the Lower Peninsula of the U.S. state of Michigan. The feature is represented by a nearly circular pattern of geologic sedimentary strata in the area with a nearly uniform structural dip toward the center of the peninsula.
The Haynesville Shale is an informal, popular name for a Jurassic Period rock formation that underlies large parts of southwestern Arkansas, northwest Louisiana, and East Texas. It lies at depths of 10,500 to 13,000 feet below the land’s surface. It is part of a large rock formation which is known by geologists as the Haynesville Formation. The Haynesville Shale underlies an area of about 9,000 square miles and averages about 200 to 300 feet thick. The Haynesville Shale is overlain by sandstone of the Cotton Valley Group and underlain by limestone of the Smackover Formation.
The Casselman Formation mapped sedimentary bedrock unit in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia, of Pennsylvanian age. It is the uppermost of two formations in the Conemaugh Group, the lower being the Glenshaw Formation. The boundary between these two units is the top of the marine Ames Limestone. The Conemaugh Group overlies the Upper Freeport coal bed of the Allegheny Formation and underlies the Pittsburgh coal seam of the Monongahela Group.
The Glenshaw Formation is a mapped sedimentary bedrock unit in Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Ohio, of Pennsylvanian age. It is the lower of two formations in the Conemaugh Group, the upper being the Casselman Formation. The boundary between these two units is the top of the marine Ames Limestone. The Conemaugh Group overlies the Upper Freeport coal bed of the Allegheny Formation and underlies the Pittsburgh coal seam of the Monongahela Group.
The Brown Dense limestone is an informal name used by petroleum geologists for a layer of rock that lies beneath large parts of southern Arkansas and northwest Louisiana. The Brown Dense is a 300- to 500-foot thick interval within organic-rich, fine-grained carbonate rock that comprise the Lower Member of the Smackover Formation. Within this area, the Lower Smackover Member lies at depths of 8,000 to 10,000 feet beneath the land surface.
The Black River Group is a geologic group that covers three sedimentary basins in the Eastern and Midwestern United States. These include the Appalachian Basin, Illinois Basin and the Michigan Basin. It dates back to the Late Ordovician period. It is roughly equivalent to the Platteville Group in Illinois. In Kentucky and Tennessee it is also known as the High Bridge Group. In areas where this Geologic Unit thins it is also called the Black River Formation (undifferentiated). One example of this is over the Cincinnati Arch and Findley Arch. Large parts of the Black River have been dolomized (where the parent limestone CaCO3 has been turned into dolomite CaMg(CO3)2.) This happed when there was interaction of hot saline brine and the limestone. This created hydrothermal dolomites that in some areas serve as petroleum reservoirs.
The Annona Chalk is a geologic formation in Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. It preserves fossils dating back to the Cretaceous period. The formation is a hard, thick-bedded to massive, slightly fossiliferous chalk. It weathers white, but is blue-gray when freshly exposed. The unit is commercially mined for cement. Fossils in the Annona Chalk include coelenterates, echinoderms, annelids, bivalves, gastropods, cephalopods, and some vertebrate traces. The beds range in thickness, up to over 100 feet in depth in some areas ., but thins to the east and is only a few feet thick north of Columbus, Arkansas and is completely missing to the east. The break between the Annona Formation and the Ozan Formation appears to be sharp with a few tubular borings up to a foot long extending down from the Annona in to the Ozan.
The De Queen Formation, formerly known as the DeQueen Limestone Member is a Mesozoic geological formation located in southwestern Arkansas and southeastern Oklahoma in the United States. Fossil sauropod and theropod tracks have been reported from the formation. It preserves fossils dating back to the Cretaceous period, particularly the Albian age.
The Morrow Formation is a geologic formation from the Pennsylvanian geological age that is found in locations ranging from Southeast New Mexico and West Texas to locations in Oklahoma, Southwestern Kansas, and Arkansas. It preserves fossils dating back to the Carboniferous period.
The Eagle Ford Group is a sedimentary rock formation deposited during the Cenomanian and Turonian ages of the Late Cretaceous over much of the modern-day state of Texas. The Eagle Ford is predominantly composed of organic matter-rich fossiliferous marine shales and marls with interbedded thin limestones. It derives its name from outcrops on the banks of the West Fork of the Trinity River near the old community of Eagle Ford, which is now a neighborhood within the city of Dallas. The Eagle Ford outcrop belt trends from the Oklahoma-Texas border southward to San Antonio, westward to the Rio Grande, Big Bend National Park, and the Quitman Mountains of West Texas. It also occurs in the subsurface of East Texas and South Texas, where it is the source rock for oil found in the Woodbine, Austin Chalk, and the Buda Limestone, and is produced unconventionally in South Texas and the "Eaglebine" play of East Texas.
The Etchegoin Formation is a Pliocene epoch geologic formation in the lower half of the San Joaquin Valley in central California.
The San Joaquin Formation is a Pliocene epoch geologic formation in the lower half of the San Joaquin Valley in central California.
The West Siberian petroleum basin is the largest hydrocarbon basin in the world covering an area of about 2.2 million km2, and is also the largest oil and gas producing region in Russia.
Bromine production in the United States of 225,000 tonnes in 2013 made that country the second-largest producer of bromine, after Israel. The US supplied 29 percent of world production. Since 2007, all US bromine has been produced by two companies in southern Arkansas, which extract bromine from brine pumped from the Smackover Formation. At an advertised price of US$3.50 to US$3.90 per kg, the US 2013 US production would have a value of roughly US$800 million.
The geology of Saudi Arabia includes Precambrian igneous and metamorphic basement rocks, exposed across much of the country. Thick sedimentary sequences from the Phanerozoic dominate much of the country's surface and host oil.