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The AAPG/Datapages Combined Publications Database

AAPG Bulletin

Abstract


Volume: 71 (1987)

Issue: 3. (March)

First Page: 334

Last Page: 345

Title: Contemporaneous Subsidence and Fluvial Channel Sedimentation: Upper Mannville C Pool, Berry Field, Lower Cretaceous of Alberta

Author(s): John C. Hopkins (2)

Abstract:

Upper Mannville C pool is a small oil pool which produces from Lower Cretaceous fluvial sandstones in Berry field, southeastern Alberta. Ultimate oil reserves of the pool are 5.8 million m3 of oil contained within a sandstone body about 7.5 km long and 2 km wide.

The pool is unusual for its occurrence on the flank of a local structural high, within a large, regional structural depression. Sandstone distribution, rather than present-day structure, dictates the occurrence of hydrocarbons, yet the distribution of sandstones was controlled by structure. A fluvial channel was diverted into an area of synsedimentary faulting or downwarping, which then controlled the depositional form of an asymmetric wedge of channel, levee, and crevasse-splay sands.

The most likely cause of subsidence was differential salt solution. Regionally, the Berry area lies along the margin of several Devonian salt formations which are known to have undergone partial solution. Lateral migration of the locus of salt solution (and hence, subsidence) through time produced both the facies and structural configurations observed in this oil pool.

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