USGS Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal: Status Report and Initial Ranking of Arctic Sedimentary Basins

Gautier, Donald L.¹, L.P. White², Arthur Grantz³ (1) U. S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, CA (2) U.S. Geological Survey, Houston, (3) Consulting Geologist, Palo Alto, CA

The Arctic has globally significant upside petroleum potential, coupled with high geologic, technologic, and economic uncertainty. While a few basins, such as the North Slope of Alaska, Timan-Pechora, and the West Siberian Basin, are known to contain large volumes of hydrocarbons, most of the Arctic remains unexplored, untested, and unevaluated.

In support of a USGS project to appraise the petroleum potential, a new map of Arctic sedimentary successions has been compiled; more than 100 sedimentary accumulations have been identified and classified according to (1) geologic age, (2) sediment thickness, (3) tectonic setting, and (4) data availability. These four classifications provide the analytical basis for province definition and for initial province ranking that integrates petroleum potential and geologic uncertainty. This integrated ranking may be useful to governments and industry in allocating human and financial resources to Arctic resource evaluation, and may also be of interest in current exploration planning.

A basin evolution chart is being prepared for each ranked province. The chart will support (1) evaluation of the geological risk of existence of large petroleum systems, (2) basin modeling, (3) identification of appropriate analogs to be used in further geologic, engineering and economic evaluation and (4) probabilistic assessment of undiscovered petroleum resources. The northeast Greenland shelf has been selected as a prototype for demonstrating the methodology.