Oil at Lick Creek field, Claiborne Parish, Louisiana, is produced from a calcarenite bar at the top of the Late Jurassic Smackover Formation. Production is limited updip by absence of porosity and downdip by water.

On the Smackover shelf slope, calcarenite deposition and resultant porosity were concentrated on turbulent shoals localized by contemporaneous structural movement. Isopach maps of intervals in the upper Smackover at Lick Creek show stratigraphic closure, and some structural irregularity presumably initiated deposition of these intervals. If structural closure were present, it has been removed by subsequent tilting, leaving only a pronounced nose.

The reservoir facies at Lick Creek is largely oolites with sparry calcite cement and primary intergranular porosity; it grades into the overlying Buckner mudstone. Below the reservoir there is a thick terrigenous section, mostly calcareous sandstone. Underlying this sandstone is a pellet-mud facies which is commonly partly dolomitized, and associated with it are zones of microcrystalline dolomite and of disturbed mud with birdseyes. Below the pellet mud, a mixed facies, which elsewhere contains a variety of grains and matrix, is postulated.

Because of hypersalinity during deposition, Smackover allochems are almost entirely nonskeletal and are similar to those forming in the Bahamas. In the Lick Creek area, upper Smackover sedimentation began with deposition of a pellet mud in quiet, shallow water; a widespread zone of dolomite within this facies suggests a period of subaerial exposure. Structural shifts caused local turbulence, resulting in deposition of a bar of mixed facies. Following a decrease in turbulence, pellet mud again spread over the entire area, and supratidal flats were present on the north. A flood of terrigenous detritus reduced the importance of carbonate deposition for a time, but this influx ceased abruptly. Salinity and turbulence became favorable for intensive oolite accretion, and the reservoir facie was deposited. Continued regression and increasing amounts of fine terrigenous detritus caused a transition to Buckner evaporitic mudflats.