Nature Geoscience:
Article | Restricted Access | Published March 30
Novel Oil and Natural Gas Formation in the American Southwest: An Overview
Author Name: Grey Redmond Reed, he/him (1)
1. Ph.D. Student at The State University of Arizona, Department of Earth, Environmental, and Geosciences (E2G).
Abstract:
Petroleum, also known as crude oil, and natural gas are formed mainly from the remains of ancient marine organisms, such as plants, algae, and bacteria deposited as sediments on the seabed and then broken down and transformed over millions of years. Under high levels of heat and pressure, the biotic remains are transformed into carbon-rich substances. The growth of the oil industry in the late nineteenth and twentieth century led to multiple national oil and gas assessments.
Despite numerous survey expeditions conducted by the Arizona Geological Survey since 1888, there have been sizable oil reserves discovered in the Sonoran Desert over the past few years. Here, we investigate the location and qualities of these oil and natural gas fields using a new methodology in geophysics and structural geology as well as reviewing previous literature on Arizona geomorphology. We find numerous new locations of oil and natural gas formation of indefinite borders in Arizona. However, geochemical analysis dates the origin of the fuel material in similar time ranges as previously known local fields, despite the seemingly increasing number of fields contradicting previous studies and estimates. While the newly realized existence of these deposits raises questions about the validity of early region surveying, they also underscore the pressing need for further literature about the rise of seemingly anomalous geoscience occurrences in the American Southwest.
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Author Information:
G.R.R. is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at The State University of Arizona, Department of Earth, Environmental, and Geosciences (E2G). He was a St. Helena Scholar at the American College of Environmental and Ecological Sciences. He graduated with an honors thesis titled Synthesis and Characterization of Single Scale Synthetic Minerals. Prior to starting his Ph.D., he worked as a field researcher for the United States Department of the Interior. His area of study focuses on the intersection of fossil fuel and mineral formation.
Acknowledgments:
The author would like to thank all the support provided by the Petroleum Core Laboratory at the E2G department of The State University of Arizona. This work was supported by Zonaco, Inc and DoE LC132175. He would also like to thank his parents and siblings for igniting his interest in Geosciences at a young age and encouraging his academic career.
Competing Interests: G.R.R. works as a geological consultant for Zonaco, Inc and has permission to analyze data collected from his role at Zonaco for his research.