Atlas of Appalachian Basin Oil and Gas Plays: The Oriskany Sandstone Play--a Preliminary Example

Abstract

The assessment of the nation's undiscovered petroleum resources by the US Geological Survey uses the identification of geologically defined plays and the estimation of the size distribution and number of undiscovered fields in each play from historical production data. The Appalachian basin contains six major oil and gas plays, but in contrast to more recently drilled basins, the plays of the mature Appalachian basin lack a complete geologic and production database. Data such as reservoir porosity, permeability, thickness, saturation, drilling depth, and historical production are either unknown, scattered in the literature, deeply buried in company and government files, or exist in incomplete regional government and private commercial data files. In an effort to increase the database and to improve the assessment of the basin, an informal atlas was initiated to test the feasibility of acquiring additional data and the utility of these data in improving the assessment. Critical to the assessment procedure and noticeably incomplete in the basin are the historical cumulative production data necessary for analyzing the distribution of the number of fields and field sizes for the individual plays. Of the Appalachian basin plays, the Oriskany Sandstone play was initially selected and encouraging amount of previously unidentified productionmore » data is available. Achieving the maximum amount of the quality of data for each play in the atlas will require the cooperation of those working in the Appalachian basin.« less