Windowed radiometrics attributes associated with vertical hydrocarbon microseepage

Abstract

Vertical hydrocarbon microseepage is the key to the formation of the windowed radiometrics surface anomalies that may indicate hydrocarbons at depth. These hydrocarbon indicating anomalies consist of the mutual divergence of the concentration of uranium (and it's daughters) versus the concentration of potassium (K40) in the soil at the surface (the K-U Couplet). In the strong anomaly, the uranium concentration goes high and the potassium concentration goes low. For interpretation, strong divergence is good and symmetrical mutual divergence is considered better than asymmetrical divergence. Since the concentrations are measured in different units, the data set is normalized to scalar integers for display. A third consideration for interpretation is the periodicity of the anomaly in the data display. A potassium base line plot of the scalar magnitude of the divergence in the normalized data often shows strong periodicity associated with areas of significant mutual divergence. These three attributes provide a method to rank the radiometric anomalies.

AAPG Datapages/Search and Discovery Article #90221 © 2015 Mid-Continent Section, Tulsa, Oklahoma, October 4-6, 2015