Gulf Coast Section

The northern Gulf of Mexico offshore area, with an estimated reserve of 100 BOE and cumulative production of 60 BOE, qualifies as a super basin. This paper describes the key elements that put this area into the top tier of petroleum habitats.

The Getty 1 Lloyd Hurt core in LaSalle County, southern Texas, provides rock data through the complete Austin Chalk section to produce a strong geologic characterization. Five lithofacies were defined that can be used to evaluate source-rock and reservoir quality as well as clay content.

A coarse-grained hydrate reservoir in Green Canyon Block 955 in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico was pressure cored during The University of Texas-Gulf of Mexico 2-1 (UT-GOM2-1) Hydrate Pressure Coring Expedition. This paper summarizes findings to date. Results will help future simulation models determine how these reservoirs form.

Pressure coring is the only available technology for recovering intact cores from sediment that is normally disturbed by gas expansion, dissolution, or dissociation. Samples that preserve sediment fabric and gas hydrate saturation are key for understanding reservoir properties and geomechanical behavior of gas hydrate reservoirs.

A salt diapir can produce a strong localized alteration of the temperature and pressure regime and influence the stability of gas hydrates. The authors propose a similar mechanism for other reservoirs driven by salt-controlled gas hydrate formation and dissociation elsewhere in the world.

This paper shows that the presence and distribution of a methane hydrate-bearing reservoir is strongly influenced by the channel evolution history involving early-stage sediment bypass within the channel accompanied by growth and failure of levees and late-stage deposition.

The sedimentology and stratigraphy of an unlithified deep-water channel-levee hydrocarbon reservoir, deep-water Gulf of Mexico, is described in this paper. This study shows the lithologic architecture of levee-channel turbidite reservoirs and provides insight into lithology controls on hydrate distribution and concentration.

Quantitative degassing experiments determine the influence of lithology on hydrate saturation, deep-water Gulf of Mexico. Coarse-grained sediments contain very high hydrate saturation of nearly pure methane in sediments with pore waters of near-seawater salinity prior to dissociation.