Age and significance of the Platypus Tuff Bed, a regional reference horizon in the Upper Permian Moranbah Coal Measures, north Bowen Basin

The Platypus Tuff Bed in the Permian Moranbah Coal Measures provides a basin-wide marker horizon traceable for over 300 km along strike. The bed is a tephra event unit, the product of a large-scale volcanic eruptive episode involving a pyroclastic volume > 10 km^3. The relatively even thickness (∼1-1.5 m) of the tuff across the entire northern Bowen Basin (∼10 000 km^2) implies a distant source. The tuff is ash-rich and its original geochemistry has been compromised by diagenetic alteration. Crystal content (10-15%) is dominated by quartz, suggesting a rhyolitic association. SHRIMP U-Pb analysis of zircons indicates an age of 258.9 ± 2.7 Ma for the Platypus Tuff Bed, confirming the Late Permian age that has generally been assigned to the Blackwater Group. The age framework now apparent for the coal-bearing Blackwater Group suggests an average depositional rate ranging from ∼133 m/10^6 years for its eastern depocentre in the northern Bowen Basin to ∼70 m/10^6 years in more marginal settings to the west

Testing reproducibility of vitrinite and solid bitumen reflectance measurements in North American unconventional source-rock reservoir petroleum systems

An interlaboratory study (ILS) was conducted to test reproducibility of vitrinite and solid bitumen reflectance measurements in six mudrock samples from United States unconventional source-rock reservoir petroleum systems. Samples selected from the Marcellus, Haynesville, Eagle Ford, Barnett, Bakken and Woodford are representative of resource plays currently under exploitation in North America. All samples are from marine depositional environments, are thermally mature (T >445 °C) and have moderate to high organic matter content (2.9–11.6 wt% TOC). Their organic matter is dominated by solid bitumen, which contains intraparticle nano-porosity. Visual evaluation of organic nano-porosity (pore sizes 1.0 produced lowest R values, generally ≤0.5% (absolute reflectance), similar to a prior ILS for similar samples. Other traditional approaches to outlier removal (outside mean ± 1.5*interquartile range and outside F10 to F90 percentile range) also produced similar R values. Standard deviation values < 0.15*(VR or BR) reduce R and should be a requirement of dispersed organic matter reflectance analysis. After outlier removal, R values were 0.1%–0.2% for peak oil thermal maturity, about 0.3% for wet gas/condensate maturity and 0.4%–0.5% for dry gas maturity. That is, these R values represent the uncertainty (in absolute reflectance) that users of vitrinite and solid bitumen reflectance data should assign to any one individual reported mean reflectance value from a similar thermal maturity mudrock sample. R values of this magnitude indicate a need for further standardization of reflectance measurement of dispersed organic matter. Furthermore, these R values quantify realistic interlaboratory measurement dispersion for a difficult but critically important analytical technique necessary for thermal maturity determination in the source-rock reservoirs of unconventional petroleum systems.This research was funded by the USGS Energy Resources Program