Presence of carboxylate salts in marine carbonate strata of the Ordos Basin and their impact on hydrocarbon generation evaluation of low TOC, high maturity source rocks

The total organic carbon (TOC) in the marine source rock of the Ordos Basin mostly ranges from 0.2% to 0.5%. The industrial standard commonly states that the TOC value has to be no less than 0.5% (0.4% for high mature or over-mature source rock) to form large petroleum reservoirs. However, gas source correlation indicates that the natural gas in the Jingbian gas field does receive contribution from marine source rocks. In order to determine the effect of carboxylate salts (or called as organic acid salts) on TOC in highly mature source rocks with low TOC value, we sampled the Ordovician marine source rock and the Permian transitional facies source rock in one drilled well in the southern Ordos Basin and performed infrared and GC-MS analysis. It is found that both kerogen-derived organic acids and carboxylate salt-conversed organic acids exist in both marine and transitional facies source rocks. The carboxylate salt-conversed organic acids mainly come from the complete acidification of carboxylate salts, which confirms the presence of carboxylate salts in the marine source rocks. Although the C-16:O peak is the main peak for the organic acids both before and after acidification, the carboxylate salt-conversed organic acids have much less relative abundance ahead of C-16:O compared with that of the kerogen-based and free organic acids. This observation suggests that the kerogen-based and free organic acids mainly decarboxylate to form lower carboxylic acids, whereas the carboxylate salt-conversed organic acids mainly break down into paraffins. By using calcium hexadecanoate as the reference to quantify the kerogen-derived and carboxylate salt-conversed organic acids, the high TOC (> 2.0%) marine source rocks have low carboxylate salt content and the low TOC (0.2%-0.5%) marine source rocks contain high content of carboxylate salt. Therefore, for the marine source rocks with 0.2%-0.5% TOC, the carboxylate salts may be a potential gas source at high maturity stage.