Madden deep unit of the Wind River Basin: A new frontier formation play
- Louisiana Land Exploration, Denver, CO (United States)
- TerraTek, Inc., Salt Lake City, UT (United States)
The Madden Deep unit, located in the Wind River basin of central Wyoming, has been a source of natural gas production from Upper Cretaceous and Lower Tertiary formations. Drilling in excess of 24,000 ft occurred during the mid-1980s and early 1990s to explore for and develop Paleozoic gas potential. These well bores penetrated the Upper Cretaceous Frontier Formation at depths below 20,000 ft. Open-hole logs, cores, and drilling cuttings suggest a significant gas accumulation within the Frontier. The Frontier Formation represents a series of coarsening-upward, shallow-marine sequences deposited as a seaward-stepping system along the Western Cretaceous Seaway margin. In Madden field, the fifth bench of the Frontier contains traditional facies from foreshore/beach, to upper and lower shoreface, to offshore regimes. Common to deposites elsewhere, the best reservoirs are found in the foreshore/beach settings at the top of the bench. Production is not related to easily understood porosity regimes; primary intergranular porosity is virtually nonexistent. An overpressured reservoir with numerous vertical/subvertical fractures accounts for production. Microfractures and megafractures, up to 10 mm across, provide permeabilities that exceed 1 d. Fractures are partly filled by abundant quartz and minor calcite. Mineralization would allow singificant reservoir pressure drawdown without reducing aperture width. Major fractures apparently strike west-northwest, and such orientation data may permit a horizontal drilling venture when technology is capable of surviving such deep, overpressured, and high-temperature environments.
- OSTI ID:
- 7054461
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-930947-; CODEN: AABUD2
- Journal Information:
- AAPG Bulletin (American Association of Petroleum Geologists); (United States), Vol. 77:8; Conference: Rocky Mountain section meeting of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), Salt Lake City, UT (United States), 12-15 Sep 1993; ISSN 0149-1423
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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