Print this pageAAPG ANNUAL CONFERENCE AND EXHIBITION
Making the Next Giant Leap in Geosciences
April 10-13, 2011, Houston, Texas, USA
Yinggehai (Red River) Strike-Slip Fault Zone Displacements and the Tectonic Evolution of the Yinggehai Basin, South China Sea Insights from Numerical Simulations
(1) WesternGeco, Shlumberger, Houston, TX.
(2) Department of Civil and Earth Resources Engineering, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan.
(3) Department of Geophysics, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.
The Yinggehai-Red River (Song Hong) basin extends from the northern territory of Vietnam the southeast toward the South China Sea and is the largest Tertiary sedimentary basin in Southeast Asia. Its formation was mainly influenced by Tibet crust extrusion to the Southeast as a consequence of the India-Eurasian collision about 32 Ma ago. The Red River basin is considered as having high potential as an oil and gas basin, however, the tectonic evolution of the basin with regards to hydrocarbon generation, migration and accumulation remains controversial.
In this research, which was based on the interpretation results of 10,000-km of 2D regional seismic profiles tied with well data to study the geological history of the basin, we have set up a numerical model to reconstruct the formation of the basin during regional tectonic evolution. The simulated results showed very clearly two tectonic phases of basin formation that are consistent with two phases of strike-slip displacements along the Red River fault zone. They are: 1) compressional and left-lateral strike-slip faulting; 2) extensional prior right-lateral strike-slip faulting. The simulation results also showed stressed field distributions along the Red River fault that are in accordance with observations. These results are very important in understanding the hydrocarbon accumulation and migration/secondary migration in the Yinggehai (Red River) basin for recent discoveries.