Kinetic simulating experiment on marine carbonate source rocks: Comparison of source rocks with isolated kerogens

The thick marine carbonate rocks spread widely in China. It is ch ar acterized by low TOC, high maturity and long geological history. The evaluation of marine carbonate source rocks is very important to the assessment and explora tion of oil and gas resources in China. Hydrocarbon-generating kinetics provid es a new method for quantitatively evaluating the effective source rocks. The ai m of this work is to determine the kinetic parameters of hydrocarbon generation from the marine carbonate source rocks. The results shows that the marine carbon ate source rocks and the isolated kerogens exhibit very similar kinetic paramete rs. It is suggested that the kinetic parameters of kerogen degradation measured on the whole rock give meaningful results, but more detailed data are obtained u sing kerogen concentrates. Whether kerogen isolation is necessary should depend on the basic geochemical data of the study sample. It is indicated that use of t he results of this study can quantitatively model the generation of oil and gas and examine the natural evolution of hydrocarbon of marine carbonate source rock s via extrapolation of laboratory kinetic data obtained from high, fast heating rates to very low, geological heating ones. The results of this study also provi de a new method for evaluating marine carbonate source rocks.