Winters-Domengine Total Petroleum System—Northern Nonassociated Gas Assessment Unit of the San Joaquin Basin Province: Chapter 21 in Petroleum systems and geologic assessment of oil and gas in the San Joaquin Basin Province, California

Abstract

The Northern Nonassociated Gas Assessment Unit (AU) of the Winters-Domengine Total Petroleum System of the San Joaquin Basin Province consists of all nonassociated gas accumulations in Cretaceous, Eocene, and Miocene sandstones located north of township 15 South in the San Joaquin Valley. The northern San Joaquin Valley forms a northwest-southeast trending asymmetrical trough. It is filled with an alternating sequence of Cretaceous-aged sands and shales deposited on Franciscan Complex, ophiolitic, and Sierran basement. Eocene-aged strata unconformably overlie the thick Cretaceous section, and in turn are overlain unconformably by nonmarine Pliocene-Miocene sediments. Nonassociated gas accumulations have been discovered in the sands of the Panoche, Moreno, Kreyenhagen, andDomengine Formations and in the nonmarine Zilch formation of Loken (1959) (hereafter referred to as Zilch formation). Most hydrocarbon accumulations occur in low-relief, northwest-southeast trending anticlines formed chiefly by differential compaction of sediment and by northeast southwest directed compression during the Paleogene (Bartow, 1991) and in stratigraphic traps formed by pinch out of submarine fan sands against slope shales. To date, 176 billion cubic feet (BCF) of nonassociated recoverable gas has been found in fields within the assessment unit (table 21.1). A small amount of biogenic gas forms near the surface of the AU. Map boundaries of the assessment unit are shown in figures 21.1 and 21.2; in plan view, this assessment unit is identical to the Northern Area Nonassociated Gas play 1007 considered by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in its 1995 National Assessment (Beyer, 1996). The AU is bounded on the east by the mapped limits of Cretaceous sandstone reservoir rocks and on the west by the east flank of the Diablo Range. The southern limit of the AU is the southernmost occurrence of nonassociated thermogenic-gas accumulations. The northern limit of the AU corresponds to the Stanislaus-San Joaquin county line, which also defines the northern boundary of the San Joaquin Basin Province. In the vertical dimension, the AU extends from the uppermost crystalline basement to the topographic surface (fig. 21.3), to allow for the possibility of down-section charge across fault surfaces and up-dip migration. The gas in this AU may be sourced from the Winters- Domengine(?) petroleum system, located in the Sacramento Valley north of the San Joaquin Valley, as defined by Magoon and others (1994a,b) (question mark notation derives from convention of Magoon and Dow, 1994, and indicates speculative genetic relationship between hydrocarbons and source rock). The Winters-Domengine Total Petroleum System defined for this assessment contains about 7.2 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of known, recoverable gas and includes the Rio Vista gas field, which alone accounts for 4 TCF of recoverable gas through 2002 (CDOGGR, 2003). Alternatively, the northern nonassociated gas may be sourced from the Moreno Formation within the San Joaquin Valley itself.