Inorganic geochemistry: applications to petroleum geology / Неорганическая химия: применение в нефтегазовой геологии

Petroleum is not as easy to find as it used to be. Most of the accessible sedimentary basins in the world have been explored and a large proportion of the more obvious petroleum targets have been drilled. The more risky and costly exploration becomes, the more important it is to develop new discoveries as efficiently as possible and to extract a greater proportion of the petroleum in place from existing fields. The last 15 years have seen this imperative give birth to some important new topics within the earth sciences, most of which cross the boundaries between the traditional divisions of geology as taught to undergraduate students. For example, sequence stratigraphy - now a principal tool of the exploration geologist - has emerged from classical stratigraphy and seismic interpretation; and reservoir description has been born of a long overdue relationship between reservoir engineering, sophisticated geophysics, stratigraphy and sedimentology.
Inorganic geochemistry is one more relatively new weapon in the armoury of the petroleum geologist. In its broadest sense, the subject includes the study of all of the chemical constituents of rocks and subsurface fluids, excluding only organic components based on carbon. This book makes no attempt to cover this potentially vast field in its entirety. It may appear at first glance to contain rather a mixed bag of subject matter but the choice of what to include has not been arbitrary. The themes of the book are the characterization of fluids in sedimentary basins, understanding their interaction with each other and with rocks and the application of this information to finding, developing and producing oil and gas. This might include dating quartz cement growth in a sandstone in an attempt to predict porosity distribution, or determining the extent of seawater breakthrough into a reservoir during production. There is a considerable degree of overlap with the field of sediment diagenesis but this book covers important topics with a geochemical component which would never find their way into a diagenesis book, such as strontium isotope stratigraphy, correlation and production chemistry. <...>