Abstract

Summary Hydrocarbon exploration targeting basement reservoirs is a challenging issue for the fundamentals of petroleum geology and routine industrial practices. By now, commercial production of hydrocarbons from fractured crystalline basement is well documented in the petroleum basins across the globe hosting weathered, fractured and/or altered basement fields. Understanding of the weathering processes producing disintegration, leaching and decomposition of the crystalline rocks is a key factor to predict commercial hydrocarbon potential in the basement reservoirs. Analog outcrops study conducted across the Ukrainian Crystalline Shield (UCS) and description of different weathering profiles developed upon its igneous and metamorphic rocks provides basic knowledge for predicting of basement reservoirs occurrence in the slopes of the late Devonian Dnieper-Donets basin that separate the UCS from the Voronezh Crystalline Massif in the northwest of Ukraine. More than dozen hydrocarbon fields like Khukhra-Chernetchyna, Yuliivka, Gashynivka and so on are discovered in weathered, fractured and altered basement rocks in the Northern Flank of that basin to the date. New technique developed at DEPROIL Ltd (Ivano-Frankivsk) to explore basement reservoirs applying joint inversion of seismic and gravity data demonstrates good practical results.

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