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AAPG Bulletin

Abstract


Volume: 36 (1952)

Issue: 8. (August)

First Page: 1674

Last Page: 1674

Title: Present Activity and Petroleum Possibilities in the Arkansas Valley: ABSTRACT

Author(s): N. F. Williams

Article Type: Meeting abstract

Abstract:

During the past year the Arkansas Valley of west-central Arkansas, which has produced dry gas from the Atoka formation (Pennsylvanian) for the past fifty years, has had its most intense period of activity. An estimated one million acres of leases have been taken and at least six oil companies now have surface parties working in the area. This new activity is the result of a combination of factors: (1) new and better markets for gas, (2) new discoveries with initial potentials of as much as seventy million cubic feet per day from the Atoka formation, and (3) recognition of the possibilities for production from pre-Atoka beds following discoveries of gas in the Hale formation of the Morrow group (Pennsylvanian).

This last factor was extremely important as it had previously been considered by many that the pre-Atoka sands had been silicified in the first stage of regional metamorphism, and therefore they could not be considered as potential reservoir rocks. There are now at least two gas fields, Cecil and Clarksville, producing from the Morrow group.

The Atoka gas possibilities are great in the area, which contains roughly fifty untested anticlines. Tests on at least three of these structures are either staked or drilling at the present time. The oil possibilities are still a question mark. In the Morrow and pre-Boone Mississippian outcrops to the north, there are three well-developed sandstone sections (Hale, Wedington, and Batesville), all potential reservoir rocks in the Valley. An oolitic member of the Boone limestone (Osage, Mississippian) is also present on the outcrop and may have porosity in parts of the region, as may the basal Mississippian sand, where present. In the less than a dozen scattered wells in the region that cut the older rocks, the Hale sandstone is the only formation in which appreciable porosity was found. This information is too fragmentary to properly evaluate the productive possibilities of the section involved.

Eight wells have tested the Wilcox-St. Peter (Ordovician) section in the region, but in each case the porosity present at the outcrop was absent in the subsurface. These wells also tested the Silurian-Devonian section, which is cut out at many places on the outcrop by unconformities, but again, porosity was missing.

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