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Discovery of ring faults associated with salt withdrawal basins, Early Cretaceous age, in the East Texas Basin

Scott Pickford (A Core Laboratories Company), Houston, Texas, U.S.

Corresponding author: smaione@corelab.com

Editor's note: Coherence cube is a registered trademark of Core Laboratories N.V.

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

The Jurassic Louann Salt has played a dominant role in influencing the structural and depositional history of the East Texas Basin, particularly during Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Salt tectonics is closely associated with sandstone distribution, depositional facies, and reef growth, and consequently, with petroleum traps in the basin. The stratigraphic column includes several significant regional petroleum reservoirs—the Jurassic Cotton Valley Lime, Cretaceous Pettet, James, and Rodessa Limestones, and the Woodbine Sandstone.

Salt withdrawal basins, developed during the Early Cretaceous in response to salt movement and dissolution processes, are characterized by the presence of an expanded section of Lower Cretaceous marine and deltaic sedimentary rocks. Recog-nition of ring faults associated with the evolution of these salt-withdrawal basins has gone undetected until recent coherence cube processing of a spec 3-D seismic survey acquired in 1997 following oil industry interest in exploring for Jurassic Cotton Valley Lime reef production in Henderson and Anderson Counties, Texas. The interpretation in this paper focuses on the northern part of the survey in the vicinity of the La Rue salt dome. Coherence cube is a patented poststack process that enhances visualization of faults and stratigraphic features embedded in the seismic wavelet data. The resultant seismic class can be loaded side by side with the original migrated amplitude seismic data in a 3-D workstation and used for interpretation of faults, stratigraphic discontinuities, and other seismic anomalies.

Discovery of Early Cretaceous-age ring faults brings new perspectives to development and exploration drilling in this mature petroleum province. The structural style of the high-angle ring faults creates a multitude of possible fault traps in a previously unattractive synclinal structural setting. The giant Fairway Field, which produces oil and gas from the Early Cretaceous James Limestone, is at the junction of two salt withdrawal basins that are densely populated with ring faults. . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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