AAPG Bulletin, V. 82 (1998), No. 9 (September 1998), P. 1694-1710.

Oil Migration in a Major Growth Fault: Structural Analysis of the Pathfinder Core, South Eugene Island Block 330, Offshore Louisiana¹

Steven Losh²

©Copyright 1998.  The American Association of Petroleum Geologists.  All Rights Reserved

¹Manuscript received April 8, 1996; revised manuscript received September 17, 1997; final acceptance March 2, 1998.
²Department of Geological Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853.

Funding for this work was provided by the Global Basins Research Network and Department of Energy grant DC-FC22-93BC14961 to Roger Anderson, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, with subcontract to Larry Cathles, Cornell University. I especially thank Pennzoil Exploration and Production Company, and their partners Exxon, Mobil, and Cockrell Oil Corporation, without whose involvement the Pathfinder well would not have been drilled. Paleontological analysis was done by Ardy Callender and Bernie Shaffer, Applied Biostratigraphix, Houston, and elucidated by Denise Butler, Pennzoil. Formation MicroImage interpretation was performed by Laura Foulk, Schlumberger. Bruce Hart, presently of the New Mexico Geological Survey, assisted with core logging. Quantitative x-ray diffraction work was done under the supervision of Peter Vrolijk, Exxon Production Research. I thank Bruce Malamud, Ben Brooks, and Don Turcotte for assistance with statistical analysis, Laurel Alexander for a preprint of her paper with Jim Handschy, and Mark Zoback, Susan Hippler, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful reviews. 

ABSTRACT

The Pathfinder core, collected in the South Eugene Island Block 330 field, offshore Louisiana, provides an outstanding sample of structures associated with a major growth fault that abuts a giant oil field and that is thought to have acted as a conduit for hydrocarbon migration into the producing reservoirs. Where cored, the growth-fault zone cuts semiconsolidated Pliocene-Pleistocene mudstone and is over 100 m wide. The fault zone in the core consists of three structural domains, each characterized by a distinct rock type, distribution of fault dips and dip azimuths, and distribution of spacing between adjacent faults and fractures. Although all of the domains contain oil-bearing sands, only faults and fractures in the deepest domain contain oil, even though the oil-barren fault domains contain numerous faults and fractures that are parallel to those containing oil in the deepest domain. The deepest domain is also distinguished from the other two domains by a greater degree of structural complexity and by a well-defined power-law distribution of fault and fracture spacings. Sediments in this domain behaved as competent rock with respect to fault and fracture spacing, whereas the departure from power-law distribution of fault and fracture spacing in the other two domains may reflect deformation of unconsolidated sediment. This departure from a power-law spacing distribution in the upper two domains, combined with stable isotope data that indicate low-temperature water-rock interaction within a gouge zone that separates these two fault domains, indicates that the faults in those domains may have been active only early in the history of the growth fault zone, when the sampled sediments were at shallow burial depths. Thus, these faults may predate oil migration. In contrast, the faults in the oil-bearing domain appear to have been active later in the fault zone’s history, when the sediments faulted as competent rock and when geologic and organic geochemical investigations indicate oil migrated into the Block 330 reservoirs. Even though oil is present in sands throughout the core, its restriction to faults and fractures in the youngest sampled portion of the fault zone implies that oil migrated only through that part of the fault that was active during the time when oil had access to it. The absence of oil in fractures or faults in the other, probably older, fault domains indicates that the oil was never sufficiently pressured to flow up the fault zone on its own, either by hydraulic fracture or by increased permeability as a result of decreased effective stress. Instead, fluid migration along faults and fractures in the Pathfinder core was enhanced by permeability created in response to relatively far-field stresses related to minibasin subsidence.