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The AAPG/Datapages Combined Publications Database

CSPG Special Publications

Abstract


Facts and Principles of World Petroleum Occurrence — Memoir 6, 1980
Pages 998-998
Symposium Abstracts

Oil in Egypt: Abstract

Rushdi Said1

Viewed in the light of the concept of plate tectonics, Egypt formed part of a converging continental margin up to the end of the Eocene, when its eastern part split to form a diverging margin in response to the initiation of the active spreading centre of the Red Sea. The early geologic history is intimately connected with the closing of the Tethys seaway and the column of sediments in northern Egypt is therefore made up of a thick, deformed Pre-Eocene section and a flat lying Tertiary cover. Oil occurrences in this province are associated with the northeast-southwest anticlinal folds that cut along northern Egypt. Source rocks are most likely the Cretaceous shale, while the producing horizons range from Paleozoic to Cretaceous. The Nile Delta is a post Upper-Miocene development, built up of thick elastic sediments with rapid facies changes, which provide opportunities for hydrocarbon generation and accumulation.

The Gulf of Suez-Red Sea province forms part of a spreading sea floor with high thermal gradients concurrent with shallow water deposition of sediment. This favours the generation of oil and the development of reservoirs and seals. Most, if not all, fields hitherto discovered in the Gulf of Suez are interpreted as fossil rifts with higher paleotemperatures. Production comes either from interbedded sandstones and evaporites of the Miocene which have been draped over tilted fault blocks, or from any porosity which these Miocene source rocks have met as oil moved out of the basin to the adjacent tilted blocks.

Acknowledgments and Associated Footnotes

1 12 Road 85, Maadi, Cairo, Egypt

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