Comparison of the Dakhla Formation source rock potential between Komombo Basin and Gebel Duwi, Upper Egypt
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Comparison of the Dakhla Formation source rock potential between Komombo Basin and Gebel Duwi, Upper Egypt Moamen Ali 1
&
Mohamed Darwish 2 & Mahmoud A. Essa 1 & Ahmed Abdelhady 3
Received: 13 June 2018 / Accepted: 5 September 2019 # Saudi Society for Geosciences 2019
Abstract The Campanian-Maastrichtian Dakhla Formation consists mainly of dark gray, laminated shale with siltstone and sandstone inter-beds containing highly organic matter and is a potential source rock. The main objectives of the present research are to correlate the geochemical characteristics of the Dakhla Formation east and west of the River Nile in Upper Egypt and to discuss the main reasons for their variations. Fifty-nine samples were collected from the Komombo Basin and examined along with 230 published ditch and core samples from Gebel Duwi. These data indicate that the quality of the Dakhla source rock potentially varies from fair to good in the Komombo Basin with TOC 0.46–2.66 wt.% and good to excellent in Gebel Duwi with TOC of 2.1–14 wt.%. Additionally, the Dakhla Formation kerogen is type III and type I/II kerogen in the Komombo Basin and Gebel Duwi, respectively; the organic matter of the Dakhla Formation in the Komombo Basin is mostly of terrigenous origin, while in Gebel Duwi, it is mostly of marine origin. Based on vitrinite reflectance (%Ro) and Tmax values, the analyzed samples of Dakhla source rock are in the immature to early mature stage for oil and gas generation in both areas where the Tmax values have a range of 422–444 °C in the Komombo Basin and 412–435 °C in the Gebel Duwi area, while %Ro values range from 0.43 to 0.78% in the Komombo Basin. Keywords Komombo . Gebel Duwi . Dakhla Formation . Source rock potential . Upper Egypt
Introduction The Komombo Basin is situated in the southern Western Desert, approximately 65 km northwest of Aswan (Fig. 1a). This basin is considered a half-graben (Fig. 2), intracontinental rift basin; it is considered the only producing basin in southern Egypt (Ali et al. 2017a). Bosworth et al. (2008) mentioned that the stress regime created in North and Central Africa associated with the creation of the South Atlantic was responsible for the creation of the Komombo Basin. This basin is bounded by a major normal fault striking NW-SE that is situated to the NE side of the Komombo Basin and down-thrown towards the southwest. Many minor normal Responsible Editor: Santanu Banerjee
faults are also characterized by the same NW-SE direction (Fig. 1b). The Komombo Basin contains approximately 13100 ft. of sediments (Fig. 3), mainly clastic rocks (shale and sandstone) with some carbonate deposits (Ziegler 1992). The main objective of the current research is to (1) identify the geochemical characteristics of the Dakhla source rock in the Komombo Basin; (2) compare the results for the Komombo area to the geochemical characteristics for the Dakhla source rock in Gebel Duwi, the Qusier area discussed by El-Kammar (2015), El-Shafeiy et al. (2017), and Fathy et al. (2018); and (3) explain
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