Abstract:

The Upper Devonian Grosmont platform in Alberta, Canada, is the world’s largest heavy oil reservoir hosted in carbonates, with 400-500 billion barrels of IOIP at an average depth of about 250 – 400 m. Advanced thermal recovery technologies, such as SAGD and electrical in-situ retorting, much higher world market prices for oil and certain political pressures have led to a flurry of activity in the Grosmont since 2006.
The sedimentary stratigraphy of the Grosmont reservoir consists of six stacked car-bonate units interbedded with marls and some evaporites. The latter two originally acted as aquitards during diagenesis but are breached or missing in parts of the area today. Dolomitization by density-driven reflux was the first pervasive diagenetic pro-cess. A dense fracture network was created in three or four phases. Most fractures probably originated from collapse following subsurface salt dissolution and/or from Laramide tectonics far to the west, whereby pulsed crustal loading in the fold-and-thrust belt created a dynamic forebulge in the Grosmont region via multiple pulses of basin-wide crustal flexing, each followed by relaxation. The fracture network probably was reactivated and/or expanded by glacial loading and post-glacial isostatic rebound in the Pleistocene and Holocene, respectively.
The region experienced three or four prolonged periods of epigene karstification, alt-hough there is tangible evidence for only two of them in the Grosmont platform. The first of these episodes was a ‘warm epigene karstification’ during the Jurassic - Creta-ceous, and the second was/is a ‘cold epigene karstification’ that started sometime in the Cenozoic and is continuing to this day. In addition, there is circumstantial evidence for hypogene ‘karstification’ (= dissolution) throughout much of the geologic history of the Grosmont since the Late Devonian. Karstification was accompanied and/or by fol-lowed by extensive hydrocarbon biodegradation.