GEOLOGY OF THE WILLISTON BASIN, NORTH DAKOTA, MONTANA, AND SOUTH DAKOTA, WITH REFERENCE TO SUBSURFACE DISPOSAL OF RADIOACTIVE WASTES
The southern Williston basin, which underlies about 110,000 square miles in Nonth Dakota, South Dakota, and eastern Montana, is part of a large structural and sedimentary basin. The sedimentary sequence that fills the basin has a maximum thickness of about 16,700 feet and rests on Precambrian metamorphic rocks at depths of 500to 13,900 feet below sea level. It contains rocks of every geologic system from Cambrian to Quaternary. Rocks of the Williston basin are gently folded and regional dips are 1 deg or less from the margins to the basin center. The most important mineral resource of the area is oil, which is produced predominantly from the Paleozoic carbonate sequence and largely on three of the major anticlinal folds, and lignite, which is present near the surface in Paleocene rocks. The subsurface disposal of radioactive wastes at some places in the Williston basis appears to be geographically and geologically feasible. Many sites, at which large quantities of wastes might be injected with minimal danger of contamination of fresh-water aquifers with oil-producing strata, are available. The strata and types of reservoirs that deserve primary consideration for waste disposal are the Winnipeg Formation of Middle Ordovician age as a deep salaquifer, the Permian to Jurassic salt beds as moderately deep units in which solution cavities might be created for storage, the thick Upper Cretaceous shale beds as shallow hydraulically fractured shale reservoirs, and the Newcastie Sandstone of Early Cretaceous age as a shallow shale-enclosed sandstone reservoir. (auth)
- Research Organization:
- Geological Survey, Washington, D.C.
- NSA Number:
- NSA-16-027419
- OSTI ID:
- 4817363
- Report Number(s):
- TEI-809
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: Orig. Receipt Date: 31-DEC-62
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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