Petroleum reservoir

A petroleum reservoir or oil and gas reservoir is a subsurface pool of hydrocarbons contained in porous or fractured rock formations. Petroleum reservoirs are broadly classified as conventional and unconventional reservoirs. In case of conventional reservoirs, the naturally occurring hydrocarbons, such as crude oil or natural gas, are trapped by overlying rock formations with lower permeability. While in unconventional reservoirs the rocks have high porosity and low permeability which keeps the hydrocarbons trapped in place, therefore not requiring a cap rock. Reservoirs are found using hydrocarbon exploration methods.

Crude oil found in all oil reservoirs formed in the Earth's crust from the remains of once-living things. Crude oil is properly known as petroleum, and is used as fossil fuel. Evidence indicates that millions of years of heat and pressure changed the remains of microscopic plant and animal into oil and natural gas.

Roy Nurmi, an interpretation adviser for Schlumberger, described the process as follows: "Plankton and algae, proteins and the life that's floating in the sea, as it dies, falls to the bottom, and these organisms are going to be the source of our oil and gas. When they're buried with the accumulating sediment and reach an adequate temperature, something above 50 to 70 °C they start to cook. This transformation, this change, changes them into the liquid hydrocarbons that move and migrate, will become our oil and gas reservoir."

In addition to the aquatic environment, which is usually a sea, but might also be a river, lake, coral reef or algal mat, the formation of an oil or gas reservoir also requires a sedimentary basin that passes through four steps: deep burial under sand and mud, pressure cooking, hydrocarbon migration from the source to the reservoir rock, and trapping by impermeable rock. Timing is also an important consideration; it is suggested that the Ohio River Valley could have had as much oil as the Middle East at one time, but that it escaped due to a lack of traps. The North Sea, on the other hand, endured millions of years of sea level changes that successfully resulted in the formation of more than 150 oilfields.

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