Monthly Luncheon

Speaker: Lucy Ko
Company: Research Assistant Professor at the Bureau of Economic Geology, UT-Austin, working in both MSRL (Mudrock System Research Laboratory) and STARR (State of Texas Advanced Resource Recovery) groups
Presentation: Petroleum System Elements of the Pennsylvanian (Desmoinesian) Strawn Group

Petroleum System Elements of the Pennsylvanian (Desmoinesian) Strawn Group

Lucy Tingwei Ko, Xun Sun, Eric Radjef, Kelly Hattori
Bureau of Economic Geology, Jackson School of Geosciences, the University of Texas at Austin
The Strawn Group, deposited during the Pennsylvanian icehouse period, represents significant sandstone, carbonate, and mixed carbonate-sand reservoirs on the Eastern Shelf of the Permian Basin in Texas. These reservoirs have long been of interest due to their complex depositional histories, heterogeneous reservoir properties, and substantial hydrocarbon production potential. Sandstone reservoirs within the Strawn Group primarily consist of fluvial-deltaic and nearshore marine deposits, characterized by varying degrees of porosity and permeability influenced by depositional environment, diagenesis, and tectonic history. In contrast, the carbonate reservoirs, composed predominantly of limestone and dolostone, reflect shallow marine depositional settings with localized reefal and shoal complexes. Diagenetic processes such as dolomitization, cementation, and dissolution significantly influence reservoir quality, enhancing or reducing reservoir performance.
This ongoing study applies petroleum geochemistry to various reservoir types within the Strawn Group to enhance exploration efficiency by evaluating critical factors controlling hydrocarbon accumulation. These factors include source-rock distribution, richness, quality, thermal maturity, and the timing relationships between hydrocarbon generation, migration, accumulation, and trap formation. Preliminary results from subsurface cores, cuttings analyses, well-log correlations and interpretations, source-rock maturity assessments, and oil fingerprinting and typing have already improved understanding of the petroleum systems, particularly in carbonate reservoirs. Continued data acquisition and reservoir characterization efforts in the Strawn Group are expected to yield valuable insights for optimizing production strategies, enhancing hydrocarbon recovery, and guiding future drilling operations in this economically significant hydrocarbon province.

Bio:
Lucy Ko is a Research Assistant Professor at the Bureau of Economic Geology, UT-Austin, working in both MSRL (Mudrock System Research Laboratory) and STARR (State of Texas Advanced Resource Recovery) groups. She started her career as an organic and isotope geochemist. She earned her M.S. in Geology from the Colorado School of Mines in 2011, worked in Platt River associates as a basin modeler for one year, and completed her PhD at UT-Austin in 2017. With a research focus on the unconventional reservoirs since 2007, her work spans sedimentology, stratigraphy, petrography, and geochemistry (XRF, XRD, Rock-Eval/HAWK) to better understand and predict factors that impact depositional processes, diagenesis, and associated reservoir quality. In addition, she has been working on quantitative petrography and core description, applying machine learning and image segmentation in mudstones to improve our understanding on the redox and elemental partitioning in sedimentary rocks.

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