ABSTRACT

Infrastructure-led exploration wells drilled in turbidite-dominated depositional systems along the Gulf Coast continue to face key geologic risks including reservoir presence and reservoir quality. In particular, the Paleogene Wilcox Group shows a broad spectrum of lithofacies, depositional architecture, and reservoir quality over a stratigraphic interval exceeding 6000 ft in the thickest parts of the trend. While a number of industry-sponsored studies have argued that the depositional environment for this group ranges from traditional deep-water leveed channels, to sandstone-rich lobes that lack distributary channels and conform to the shape of the underlying topography as a braided system, to sandstone sheets, to sandstone-poor overbank deposits that likely represent deep-water background sedimentation, one of the common threads is that provenance and sedimentation process carries significant weight in determining the overall reservoir quality. These observations have built momentum to study other oil fields and their outcrop analogs through a similar lens around…