Reconstructing the Paleopositions of 27 Giant Oil and Gas Clusters Through Geologic Time

Paul Mann¹, Mike Horn², Lisa Bingham¹, and Lisa Gahagan^1
1Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
²M.K. Horn & Associates, Tulsa, OK

We have catalogued 945 giant oil and gas fields that account for 50 ± 10% of the world's petroleum reserves. The 945 giants occur in 27 cluster areas distributed over about 30% of the Earth's surface. We classify the giants into the type of tectonic basin in which they occur: 342 passive margin settings (36% of all giants), 283 continental rifts (30%), 179 continental collisional settings (19%), 57 arc collision settings (6%), 76 strike-slip settings (8%) and 8 subduction settings (1%). In this talk, we use the Plates reconstruction software to reconstruct the positions of all 945 fields through time. In the animation, giant fields are color coded so that the main reservoir units turns red when actively being deposited and then green following their deposition. Emphasis is placed on once adjacent giants now separated by large-scale plate motions including: opening of a now, broad oceanic basin (South Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico-Caribbean, Canada basin), closing of an oceanic or back-arc basin (Persian Gulf, Black Sea), and large-scale strike-slip motion (eastern China, Sakhalin). The position of emerging giant clusters in the South China Sea, western China, and the Bay of Bengal are classified and reconstructed to identify possible conjugate twins.

AAPG Search and Discover Article #90078©2008 AAPG Annual Convention, San Antonio, Texas