Abstract

The Bone Spring formation is one of the most recent and exciting oil and gas plays in the Permian Basin. The Production from the Bone Spring carbonate, shale, and sand facies has expanded in the past ten years from the Northeast Delaware Basin from the Scharb Field to the Southeast Basin in War- Wink South Field. (Montgomery 1997) This Production has increased in the last several years to encompass areas in the Northwest Basin near the Abo-Yeso shelf edge into deeper parts of the Northern Basin and further southwest from the Central Basin Platform into Culberson and Reeves counties respectively. This production is considered unconventional in the sense that it requires horizontal drilling and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing in order to economically complete the wells. However, little work has been published establishing the Total Organic Content of the Bone Spring Formation as has been done with many other unconventional resource plays in the United States.

This study will employ a commonly used petrophysical technique, the Delta Log R method, to calculate the Total Organic Content from well logs. (Passey et. al.1990) The results from the Delta Log R Technique will be compiled and compared with to cuttings samples (Broadhead 2010) and outcrop samples taken for this study to gain a better understanding of the Total Organic Content of the Bone Spring Formation as well as any trends exist in the Delaware Basin. The goal of this study is to compare the Total Organic Content to the Level of Organic Maturity compiled by (USGS open file report 2005-1171) and generate a Level of Maturity Map with respect to the Total Organic content of the Bone Spring Formation. The discussion of the methods used for this study will show how this technique can be inexpensively employed using common computer software.