APPLICATION OF MICROELEMENT COMPOSITION TO THE CORRELATION OF SOLID BITUMEN WITH SOURCE ROCKS

There distributes a lot of destroyed old oil pools in the carbonate rock areas of South China. Former dissolvable bitumen or crude oil has been changed into insoluble vein or mottled solid bitumen through hundreds of millions of weathering, Bacause of the insolubility of solid bitumen, it is difficult to make oil source correlation and further researches using many effective conventional methods. It is discovered that the relationship between crude oil and source rocks is similar to that between ore occurrence and provenance (or ore solution) in the course of deposit formation. The ore source correlation is usually conducted by microelements. That,will the microelements in organic source rocks be carried out when crude oil or bitumen migrates away from source rocks? For this reason,the authors attempted to measure the microelements in solid bitumen and potential source rocks. By combining carbon isotopic and other analysis, the true source rocks of solid bitumen are discovered. On this basis, the genesis of old oil pools in the study area is studied successfully.