Greater Caspian Provenance Project 2017-2018
Despite being a well-established petroleum province, limited data are available on sandstone composition and provenance from the Greater Caspian region. We began to address this data gap in this, the first phase of the project, by reporting petrographic and conventional heavy mineral provenance data from two sample sets. The first comprised 14 Quaternary to modern sands from the Amu Darya and its tributaries and distributaries in Uzbekistan. These provide a provenance fingerprint for the Amu Darya River system. The second consisted of 30 Jurassic and Cretaceous sandstones and sandy mudstones from outcrops and wells in Russia and Turkmenistan. These help to characterise sediment source areas to the north and east of the Caspian Basin. The latter dataset was complemented by the compilation of an extensive Soviet-era petrographic and heavy mineral database of average Jurassic and Cretaceous sandstone compositions from the regions surrounding the North and Middle Caspian basins. This has proved particularly helpful in providing insights into compositionally controlled regional trends in sandstone reservoir potential.
Completed: July 2020.
Contact(s): Stephen Vincent