Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; Departement Aard- en Omgevingswetenschappen; Afdeling fysico-chemische geologie, more, partner
Studies of the influence of changes in relative sea level and rate of sediment supply, which make the basis for sequence stratigraphy, have so far been most successfully applied to transitional and shallow-marine environments. In such environments, there are also potential links between sequence stratigraphy and the mineralogical and geochemical modifications, which hence allow a considerably improve ability to predict the reservoir quality of these sediment packages. Conversely, both sequence stratigraphy and its relationship to the mineralogical, geochemical composition and reservoir quality of deep-sea sediments are still poorly constrained in the literature. The fundamental hypothesis that we thus seek to test is that changes in the relative sea level are probably accompanied by predictable changes in the primary sand composition and texture as well as the diagenetic modifications of deep-marine clastic sequences in passive continental margins. The present proposal brings together a large spectrum of approaches to develop our understanding of the geometry and the prediction of reservoir quality in this tectonic setting. A detailed assessment of the mineral content and texture of these reservoirs is, for the first time, tentatively integrated with facies analysis in a sequence stratigraphy context, exploring the interest of bulk rock geochemistry in scaling upwards the mineralogical information. The expected achievement is a conceptual model predicting primary sand composition and, when combined with modeling of the thermal history and the fluid-induced changes in mineralogy and porosity-permeability, an integrated tool for the evaluation of reservoir quality in deep-marine clastic deposits. The sequences selected to test our basic hypothesis and the complementarities of the proposed approaches are taken from offshore New Jersey as well as from the 4 Faeroe/Shetland and the Vøring Basin, at the British and the Mid-Norwegian continental shelves, respectively.
