Oil and Gas Traps

Oil and Gas in Rocks

You may have heard that oil is found underground in "pools", or "lakes", or "rivers". Maybe
someone told you there was a "sea" or "ocean" of oil underground. This is all completely
wrong, so don't believe everything you hear.

Almost all oil and gas is found within the tiny spaces in sedimentary rocks,
mainly sandstone and coarse-grained limestones. Imagine that a sponge is
a hunk of sandstone or limestone. The sponge is full of holes, or "pores",
that can contain water or oil or gas. Limestone and sandstone, even though
hard, also contain lots of holes. The holes are much tinier than sponge
holes, but they are still holes, called "porosity". The oil and gas become
trapped in these holes, and they stay there, for millions of years, until
Petroleum Geologists come to find it and get it out.

When you hold a piece of sandstone containing oil in your hand, the rock may look and smell
oily, but the oil usually won't run out, and you can't squeeze sandstone like a sponge! The oil
is trapped inside the rock's porosity.

How do oil and natural gas get into the rocks in the first place? There are several ideas about
how this happens, but one idea is very popular , and it is called...

The Big Idea of Oil Formation and Oil Movement

This sounds very important, and it is, but it's not hard to understand. If you know this, you will
know more than most everyone else about where oil comes from, and how it gets there.

The very fine-grained shale we talked about previously is one of the most common sedimentary
rocks on earth. In many places, thousands upon thousands of feet of shale are stacked up like
the pages in a book, deep underground. It is not unusual to have layers in the earth's crust
made up mostly of shale that are 4 miles thick. These shales were deposited in deep, quiet
ocean waters over millions of years time.

During much of the earth's history, the land areas we now know as continents were covered
with water. This situation allowed tremendous piles of sediment to cover huge areas. The
oceans may have gone away from the land we now live on, but the great deposits of shale and
sandstone remain deep underground....right under our feet!

The Tiny Gigantic Kingdom

But what about the oil and gas? For the answer, we need to move to the ancient oceans that
once covered almost all of the earth.

We often think of sharks and whales as being the kings of the deep oceans.
Actually, there are other animals that have established giant kingdoms in the
sea...the largest and most impressive kingdoms of all! These animals are
various kinds of microscopic creatures....both plant and animal. Most of them
would fit on the head of a pin. They are tiny, but there are trillions upon
trillions of them. When these creatures die, they sink to the bottom and
become part of the shale sediments there.

The animals die and rain down on the ocean floor all the time. And since the beginning of life
on earth, they have been living their exciting lives in the ocean, dying, sinking to the bottom, and
becoming part of the once-living matter that is part of all shale rocks.

Sea-Floor Gunk
Of course, whales, sharks, and fish die too, and their bodies end up on the ocean bottom, where
they rot, and also become part of the shale. And, over the long periods of geologic time,
animals that are now extinct, like Trilobites and Ammonoids, lived and died in the oceans.

But, it is the trillions of tiny animals that have made up most of the living gunk (the scientific
name for this gunk is "ooze") deposited on the ocean floor. You have probably heard of the
Ozone Layer. You probably did not know there was an "OOZONE LAYER", too! Well, it's not
really called that, but that's what it is! Just a mixture of sand, silt, mud, and the bodies of ocean
animals piled up on the sea floor. Sea-floor gunk!

Later, when thousands of feet of shale have piled up over millions of years, and the animal
bodies are buried very deep (more than two miles down), an amazing thing happens. The heat
from deep inside the earth "cooks" the animals, turning their bodies into what we call
hydrocarbons......oil and natural gas.

Movin' Out

At first, the oil and gas only exist between the shale
particles as extremely tiny blobs. Then, the intense
pressure of the earth squeezes the oil and gas out of the
shale, and the oil and gas fluids move sideways many,
many miles. On their way, they may meet up with other
traveling oil fluids.

Finally, the oil and gas may become "trapped" in a rock

formation like sandstone or limestone....a trap they can't
escape! The oil and gas stay there, under tremendous
pressure, until the PG comes to get it. After they are
formed, oil and gas must be "trapped" in order to remain
in place until it can be found. Without a trap, the PG has
no place to drill. All oil and gas deposits are held in some
sort of trap.

There are two basic types of traps:

Structural traps hold oil and gas because the earth has been bent and deformed in some way.
The trap may be a simple dome (or big bump), just a "crease" in the rocks, or it may be a more
complex fault trap like the one shown at the right.

Stratigraphic traps are depositional in nature. This means they are formed in place, usually by
a sandstone ending up enclosed in shale. The shale keeps the oil and gas from escaping the
trap.
Here are four traps. The anticline is a structural type of trap, as is the fault trap and the salt
dome trap.

The stratigraphic trap shown was formed when rock layers at the bottom were tilted, then
eroded flat. Then more layers were formed horizontally on top of the tilted ones. The oil moved
up through the tilted porous rock and was trapped underneath the horizontal, nonporous rocks.

The hole at the right has

been drilled into a
sandstone that was
deposited in a stream
bed. This type of
sandstone follows a

winding path, and can be hard

to hit with a drill bit!

This type of sandstone is usually enclosed in shale,

making this a stratigraphic trap.

Just because you drill for oil or gas does not mean that you will find it! Oil and gas reservoirs all
have edges. If you drill past the edge, you will miss it !

Your well may find a producing reservoir very near the surface. Or you might drill into a
reservoir that has been depleted (all the oil and gas removed) by another well. There may ne a
new infill reservoir between two wells that could be developed with a third well. Or one that was
incompletely drained. Maybe if you drill a little deeper you might hit a deeper pool reservoir!
You might be able to back up and produce a bypassed compartment. The Petroleum Geologist
has to think of all these things when planning a new well.
Even though oil and gas are not easy to find, they are found in commercial quantities in many
areas of the United States. This map shows most of these areas. It's really a crummy map,
and not very accurate, and I need to replace it sometime. But for now, this is the map.

Finally, structures in the earth can give the PG many challenges. Look at the diagram to the
right. Imagine you first drilled the hole on the left into the green layer which represents a nice oil
and gas-bearing rock. YES! You have a great well, producing lots of oil and gas!

Then you drilled your second hole to the east (right) of the first one. What happened to that
hole?

Answer below.

Answer:

The oil reservoir has been split in two by the fault, which is nothing but a place in the earth
where rock layers break in two. The arrows on the diagram show that the rocks moved DOWN
on the left side of the fault and UP on the RIGHT side of the fault. This created a GAP in the oil
field......right where you drilled your second well!

Too bad. Your second well is a DRY HOLE.

First 3 diagrams, A Primer of Oil and Gas Production , 4th diagram, Pennsylvanian Sandstones
of the Mid-Continent