![Salt Creek Oil Field well](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Salt_Creek_Oil_Field_well.jpg)
The Salt Creek Oil Field is located in
Natrona County
Natrona County is a county in the U.S. state of Wyoming. As of the 2020 United States Census, the population was 79,955, making it the second-most populous county in Wyoming. Its county seat is Casper.
Natrona County comprises the Casper, WY ...
,
Wyoming
Wyoming () is a U.S. state, state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is bordered by Montana to the north and northwest, South Dakota and Nebraska to the east, Idaho to the west, Utah to the south ...
. By 1970, more oil had been produced by this field than any other in the
Rocky Mountain
The Rocky Mountains, also known as the Rockies, are a major mountain range and the largest mountain system in North America. The Rocky Mountains stretch in straight-line distance from the northernmost part of western Canada, to New Mexico in ...
s region and accounted for 20 percent of the total production in Wyoming.
[Barlow and Haun, p. 147]
Petroleum seep
A petroleum seep is a place where natural liquid or gaseous hydrocarbons escape to the earth's atmosphere and surface, normally under low pressure or flow. Seeps generally occur above either terrestrial or offshore petroleum accumulation stru ...
s in the area were known before 1880, but oil strikes near Lander led to claims by Schoonmaker and Cy Iba. In 1889 the first well to strike oil was drilled in the Shannon pool by
Philip M. Shannon, president of the Pennsylvania Oil & Gas Company, who in 1895 built an
oil refinery
An oil refinery or petroleum refinery is an industrial process plant where petroleum (crude oil) is transformed and refined into useful products such as gasoline (petrol), diesel fuel, asphalt base, fuel oils, heating oil, kerosene, lique ...
in Casper to process the oil. Dr. Porro, an Italian
geologist
A geologist is a scientist who studies the solid, liquid, and gaseous matter that constitutes Earth and other terrestrial planets, as well as the processes that shape them. Geologists usually study geology, earth science, or geophysics, althou ...
working for the Dutch company Petroleum Maatschappij Salt Creek in 1906, located the Dutch No. 1 near a large oil seep south of the Shannon wells, which was drilled in 1908. The
"gusher" well reached an oil sand after drilling through of
shale
Shale is a fine-grained, clastic sedimentary rock formed from mud that is a mix of flakes of clay minerals (hydrous aluminium phyllosilicates, e.g. kaolin, Al2 Si2 O5( OH)4) and tiny fragments (silt-sized particles) of other minerals, especial ...
.
In 1915, a portion of the Teapot Dome was made
Naval Petroleum Reserve Number 3.
Geology
The field is on an
anticline
In structural geology, an anticline is a type of fold that is an arch-like shape and has its oldest beds at its core, whereas a syncline is the inverse of an anticline. A typical anticline is convex up in which the hinge or crest is the ...
with of closure, which formed in the
Late Cretaceous
The Late Cretaceous (100.5–66 Ma) is the younger of two epochs into which the Cretaceous Period is divided in the geologic time scale. Rock strata from this epoch form the Upper Cretaceous Series. The Cretaceous is named after ''creta'', the ...
or Early
Tertiary
Tertiary ( ) is a widely used but obsolete term for the geologic period from 66 million to 2.6 million years ago.
The period began with the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, at the start ...
.
The anticline has two distinct
dome
A dome () is an architectural element similar to the hollow upper half of a sphere. There is significant overlap with the term cupola, which may also refer to a dome or a structure on top of a dome. The precise definition of a dome has been a m ...
s, the "Salt Creek Dome" to the north and the "
Teapot Dome
The Teapot Dome scandal was a bribery scandal involving the administration of United States President Warren G. Harding from 1921 to 1923. Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall had leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyomin ...
" to the south. Production is from
stratigraphic trap
In petroleum geology, a trap is a geological structure affecting the reservoir rock and caprock of a petroleum system allowing the accumulation of hydrocarbons in a reservoir. Traps can be of two types: stratigraphic or structural. Structural trap ...
s in the Lakota, Sundance and Tensleep formations plus two
Frontier Formation
The Frontier Formation is a sedimentary geological formation whose strata date back to the Late Cretaceous. The formation's extents are: northwest Colorado, southeast Idaho, southern Montana, northern Utah, and western Wyoming. It occurs in many ...
s, which is an
offshore bar sandstone
Sandstone is a clastic sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-sized (0.0625 to 2 mm) silicate grains. Sandstones comprise about 20–25% of all sedimentary rocks.
Most sandstone is composed of quartz or feldspar (both silicates) ...
, all of which are interbedded with marine shales.
This second Frontier formation extends into the Teapot Dome to the south. The Frontier lies between the
Mowry Shale
The Mowry Shale is an Early Cretaceous geologic formation. The formation was named for Mowrie Creek, northwest of Buffalo in Johnson County, Wyoming.
Description
The Mowry Shale or Fish-scale Beds because of the abundance of fish scales, is ...
and
Niobrara Formation
The Niobrara Formation , also called the Niobrara Chalk, is a geologic formation in North America that was deposited between 87 and 82 million years ago during the Coniacian, Santonian, and Campanian stages of the Late Cretaceous. It is compose ...
.
File:Salt Creek Oil Field stratigraphy.jpg, Salt Creek Oil Field Stratigraphy
File:Salt Creek Oil Field.jpg, Shannon Oil Pool in Salt Creek Oil Field
File:Geological section of Salt Creek Oil Field.png, Geological section of Salt Creek Oil Field
Enhanced Oil Recovery
In the Salt Creek field
Enhanced Oil Recovery
Enhanced oil recovery (abbreviated EOR), also called tertiary recovery, is the extraction of crude oil from an oil field that cannot be extracted otherwise. EOR can extract 30% to 60% or more of a reservoir's oil, compared to 20% to 40% using ...
with CO
2 is used to increase oil production. The CO
2 is captured in a natural gas facility in the nearby LaBarge field.
In 2016 CO
2 was leaking from an abandoned well in the field and led to the temporary closure of a school.
Notes
Bibliography
* Barlow, J.A. Jr., and Haun, J.D., 1970, Regional Stratigraphy of Frontier Formation and Relation to Salt Creek Field, Wyoming, in Geology of Giant Petroleum Fields, Halbouty, M.T., editor, AAPG Memoir 14, Tulsa: American Association of Petroleum Geologists.
* Wegemann, C.H., 1911, The Lander and Salt Creek Oil Fields, Wyoming, US Dept. of the Interior USGS Bulletin 452, Washington: Government Printing Office. (Public domain ed.)
* Wegemann, C.H., 1918, The Salt Creek Oil Field, Wyoming, US Dept. of the Interior USGS Bulletin 670, Washington: Government Printing Office. (Public domain ed.)
External links
CO2
Carbon dioxide (chemical formula ) is a chemical compound made up of molecules that each have one carbon atom covalently double bonded to two oxygen atoms. It is found in the gas state at room temperature. In the air, carbon dioxide is transpar ...
Enhanced oil recovery
Enhanced oil recovery (abbreviated EOR), also called tertiary recovery, is the extraction of crude oil from an oil field that cannot be extracted otherwise. EOR can extract 30% to 60% or more of a reservoir's oil, compared to 20% to 40% using ...
CO2 Puts New Fizz in Old Field
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Landmarks in Wyoming
Oil fields in Wyoming
Geography of Natrona County, Wyoming
Naval Petroleum Reserve