Challenges and possible solutions for burial and thermal history modelling of the Lawn Hill Platform, Isa Superbasin

The Energy component of Geoscience Australia’s Exploring for the Future (EFTF) program is aimed at improving our understanding of the petroleum resource potential of northern Australia, including the Lawn Hill Platform region of the Isa Superbasin. The Paleoproterozoic Isa Superbasin in northwestern Queensland contains organic rich sedimentary units with the potential to host both conventional and unconventional petroleum systems (Gorton &amp; Troup, 2018). On the Lawn Hill Platform, the River and Lawn supersequences of the Isa Superbasin host the recently discovered Egilabria shale gas play and are considered highly prospective shale gas targets. However, the lateral extent of these plays is currently unknown due to the limited well and associated geochemical data.
To aid in the identification of new areas with the potential to host active petroleum systems, this work assesses the burial and thermal history of the Lawn Hill Platform (Figure 1) by using organic richness, quality and thermal maturity of source rocks of the Isa Superbasin. This assessment is based on a compilation of updated and quality controlled publicly available total organic carbon (TOC), Rock-Eval pyrolysis and organic matter reflectance data, and combines revised assessments of the depth structure and isopach mapping by Bradshaw et al., (2018, in press).
Burial-thermal relationships in the basin have been difficult to determine in the past, usually attributed to multiple hydrothermal events which has resulted in erratic, and occasionally inverted, maturity reflectance profiles (Gorton and Troup, 2018; Glikson, 1993). Additional difficulties that contribute large uncertainties to our understanding are estimating the burial history across the basin, especially the maximum depth of burial and hence the estimated amount of erosion. Initial modelling suggests erosion amounts could range anywhere from several hundreds of meters to several thousands of meters across the Lawn Hill Platform region (Figure 2).  Burial and thermal history modelling is calibrated using paleo-maturity data (reflectance profiles as mentioned above, Figure 2), which is poorly constrained. Because of the age (Paleoproterozoic) of the organic matter, reflectance values of alginite and bitumen were used, which are not always comparable to the standard vitrinite reflectance profiles that are typically used for burial and thermal history modelling calibration.
In this study other options of burial-thermal model calibrations were assessed to aid in characterising the petroleum potential of this region, including; bottom hole temperature, developing an improved Tmax conversion equation specific to the Isa Superbasin region, using published conversion equations to convert alginite and bitumen reflectance to vitrinite equivalent reflectance, using HI as an indicator of thermal history, oxygen isotopes (δ18O), and fluid inclusion geothermometry.
Abstract and poster for presentation at the Australian Organic Geochemistry Conference 2018

Tags: EARTH SCIENCES, Published_External, biomarker analysis, bitumen alginite reflectance, gas geothermometry, paleo-temperature calibration techniques, source rock burial and thermal histories
Organization: Geoscience Australia Data