Abstract
Abu Madi/El Qar'a is a giant field located in the north eastern part of Nile Delta and is an important hydrocarbon province in Egypt, but the origin of hydrocarbons and their migration are not fully understood. In this paper, organic matter content, type, and maturity of source rocks have been evaluated and integrated with the results of basin modeling to improve our understanding of burial history and timing of hydrocarbon generation. Modeling of the empirical data of source rock suggests that the Abu Madi formation entered the oil in the middle to upper Miocene, while the Sidi Salem formation entered the oil window in the lower Miocene. Charge risks increase in the deeper basin megasequences in which migration hydrocarbons must traverse the basin updip. The migration pathways were principally lateral ramps and faults which enabled migration into the shallower middle to upper Miocene reservoirs. Basin modeling that incorporated an analysis of the petroleum system in the Abu Madi/El Qar'a field can help guide the next exploration phase, while oil exploration is now focused along post-late Miocene migration paths. These results suggest that deeper sections may have reservoirs charged with significant unrealized gas potential.
Highlights
The Nile Delta basin contains a thick sequence of potential hydrocarbon source rocks that generate essentially gas and condensate.The Nile Delta is generally known as a natural gas-prone region with production from Miocene and Pliocene fields
The available data generally suggest that the majority of the kerogen of Abu Madi formation belong to mature type III in the principal zone of oil generation, where Ro values range from 0.5 to 1%, with small amounts of kerogen immature type III, where Ro is less than 0.5%
This model shows that the corresponding to onset of the oil window (0.5-0.6 Ro) of the Miocene source rocks was during early Miocene at depths greater than 2000 m (Figure 11)
Summary
The Nile Delta basin contains a thick sequence of potential hydrocarbon source rocks that generate essentially gas and condensate. Sharaf [2] showed from organic geochemical and petrographic analyses that the kerogen in the early Pliocene mudstones of the Kafr El-Sheikh formation and the Tortonian Wakar formation in the NE of the Nile Delta has poor capability to generate gas and minor oil. These formations are immature in all of the wells he studied. The early Miocene Qantara and the Middle Miocene Sidi Salem formations have a poor potential to generate gas and minor oil in the southern part of the area, further north Sharaf [2]. In the early-middle Cretaceous and late Jurassic samples, the kerogen is an amorphous-woody-algal assemblage accompanied by significant proportion of inertinitic debris [2]
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