The Permian Basin Reloaded
Today I visited the classic geologic site of El Capitan at the south end of the Guadalupe Mountains in Texas. The main promontory is formed by the 200 million year old platform carbonate reefs and back reefs (reservoirs) passing east into the fore-reef and then basinal sediments (source rocks) deposited in several 100 feet of ocean. The locality is an exhumed version of the stratigraphy of the prolific Permian Basin petroleum province, one of the reasons why so many geologists have visited this place. Of course now folks are drilling fracked horizontal wells in the basinal sedimentary rocks in the subsurface Midland and Delaware basins, classically just the "source rocks" or the "kitchen", and hence rejuvenating the petroleum province.
It's 26 years since I last visited the locality. In 1990, I was on a my second assignment with BP, a junior member of the Global Basins Analysis group of the company, screening and high grading frontier plays and basins across the world, in service of BP's new focused elephant-hunting strategy. On a geologic field trip with John Hurst and Jeremy Goff, led by Alan Scott ex of UT (Al sadly passed away in May 2016), we were trying to figure out the geologic components that led to so much of the world's oil being hosted in carbonate reservoirs. There was activity in the Permian Basin - I guess like most places it was recovering from the mid-eighties downturn - but we looked at it as a "mature basin", only as a possible analog for the possible frontier plays elsewhere in the world. An example of geologic geometry of a world class, but old province, that might be repeatable elsewhere.
What's happened since was certainly beyond our imagination back then in 1990. The rejuvenation of the Permian Basin through the combination of new paradigms, with the reuse and evolution of technology (fracking) is just amazing. The financial underpinning of the rejuvenation with high oil prices and cheap debt is not so inspiring, and is causing the industry a lot of heart ache, not just in Permian, but in lesser source rock plays across north America. Nevertheless, the industry's ability to change a played out basin into a new province makes me believe that north American shale/tight oil can similarly reload itself into a lower cost of supply energy source to compete on the world stage, at any oil price.
