Results of Deep Exploratory Drilling Between Long and Newark Valleys, White Pine County, Nevada-Implications for Oil Migration in the Nearby Yankee Gold Mine Paleohydrothermal System

Abstract

In mid-1992, a consortium headed by Pioneer Oil and Gas (Midvale, Utah) drilled a deep (6700 ft) exploratory well in the southern Ruby Mountains-Buck Mountain are near the Alligator Ridge mining district in White Pine County, Nevada. The test well is located 1.5 mi southwest of USMX, Inc.'s, Yankee gold mine, an open-pit operation centered on a Carlin-type, sediment-hosted gold orebody noteworthy for containing abundant, fracture-controlled live oil. The Pioneer well as dry, but intersected much of the same stratigraphic section hosting gold at Yankee, thereby providing valuable clues to mechanisms of oil migration at this unusual, oil-bearing precious-metal deposit. Most of the gold at Yankee is hosted by the Devonian Pilot Shale, with a basal argillaceous limestone containing the bulk of the deposit's live oil. The equivalent section in the Pioneer wildcat well is a silty calcareous dolomite. Whereas the basal Pilot limestone at Yankee is rich in thick, locally gold- and arsenic-anomalous calcite veins and modules hosting abundant oil-bearing fluid inclusion, the basal Pilot dolomite in the Pioneer well contains only a few thin calcite-pyrite veinlets devoid of fluid inclusions. Moreover, the Yankee calcite veins have the same light-stable-isotope signatures as hydrothermal carbonate veins near or elsewhere inmore » the Alligator Ridge district. These relationships imply that oil at Yankee migrated in the same hydrothermal system responsible for gold mineralization. Such systems elsewhere in the eastern Basin and Range, given favorable source rocks, traps, seals, and migratory pathways, might well have formed not only gold deposits, but also rich, spatially coincident oil reservoirs.« less