Recognition and Prediction of Source Rocks of the Madingo Formation in the Lower Congo Basin

Abstract

We investigated the petrological and seismic properties of Madingo Formation, the high-quality source rocks in the Madingo Formation in the Lower Congo Basin are highly heterogeneous. Due to little drilling and oil-based mud pollution, samples that are able to be used to measure the TOC (total organic carbon) content of source rock in the Madingo Formation are few and unevenly distributed; hence, it is difficult to carry out their quantitative evaluation. We investigated the petrological and seismic properties of Madingo Formation between TOC and well logging parameters including density, natural gamma, and acoustic time difference via multiple regression analysis. The TOC data volume is calculated using a neural network model between the predicted TOC content and seismic attributes of the sidetrack. The results of TOC three-dimensional quantitative prediction in the study area show that the source rocks in the Madingo Formation have a strong heterogeneity in the vertical direction, and the plane distribution is low in the northeast and high in the southwest. This study provides suitable tools to predict the complex heterogeneous distribution of source rocks and has great significance for oil exploration in the Lower Congo Basin.

Keywords

the Lower Congo Basin / petrology / source rock prediction / Madingo Formation

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