Assessment of continuous oil resources in the Eastern Great Basin Province of Nevada, Utah, and Idaho, 2018

Abstract

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) quantitatively assessed the potential for undiscovered, technically recoverable continuous oil and gas resources in the Eastern Great Basin Province (Anna and others, 2007) of Nevada, Utah, and Idaho (fig. 1). The assessment focused on the area of the province between the Roberts Mountains and Sevier thrust systems (Peterson, 1994). The major petroleum source rocks within this area are the Upper Devonian–Lower Mississippian Pilot Shale and the Mississippian Chainman Formation (Gutschick and Rodriquez, 1979; Poole and Claypool, 1984; Giles, 1994; Trexler and others, 1995). The geologic model applied to the Pilot Shale and shales in the Chainman Formation is for these shales to have achieved generative maturity for oil by burial to at least 8,700 feet (2,652 meters) within some of the Neogene extensional basins (Grabb, 1994; Anna and others, 2007). Areas that satisfy this depth requirement were defined using modeled gravity data that were calibrated to the petroleum system in Railroad Valley and Pine Valley in Nevada (Barker and Peterson, 1991; Ïnan and Davis, 1994; Meissner, 1995; Anna and others, 2007).