Abstract

This paper relates how many of the basins being explored today can be viewed as regional petroleum accumulations. The Anadarko Basin is used to describe how its depositional and orogenic history, its patterns of deposition and subsequent patterns of hydrocarbon accumulation and its basic geochemical aspects all combine to make this basin a unique regional petroleum accumulation. The explorationist must view each basin as a unique entity and fully understand its regional characteristics in order to efficiently compete for the petroleum reserves therein. Hopefully, this premise will be brought to light with this analysis of the Anardarko Basin.

In today's exploration game the pace has become so intense that there is a tendency for the explorationist to lose sight of the regional characteristics of geologic basins—the same characteristics that dictate why we are drilling there in the first place!

We do ourselves and our company a disservice by not understanding the regional characteristics and their implications of the areas we work, not only to know where now opportunities exist but also where they do not.

Hopefully this will be of some help.

I would like to thank Chris Stull, Hardy Horton and the people at Diamond Shamrock and Murchison Exploration Company for their aid in preparing this paper.

This paper is an expanded analog to: "The Anadarko Basin - A Regional Petroleum Accumulation - A Model for Future Exploration And Development." By: Gerhard W. Hill, Jr., and Robey H. Clark, Vol. 18, Southwestern Legal Foundation, Exploration and Economics of the Petroleum Industry.