Author Description

The story of the Mississippian lime play began over a century ago and captures the evolution of oil and gas exploration in Kansas and Oklahoma--from early drilling of simple traps to the current development of unconventional resource plays characterized by high fluid volume and the associated intensive surface and subsurface plumbing infrastructure. Straddling the Kansas-Oklahoma border, the play fairway stratches in the subsurface from Grady County, Oklahoma, at its southern tip, northeastward into Osage County, Oklahoma, out to the northwestern corner of Kansas, and also includes scattered drilling throughout western Kansas and Northwestern Oklahoma. The petroleum system can be most simply described as Mississippian reservoirs charged with hydrocarbons largely migrated from mature Woodford source basins and trapped by the overlying blanket of Pennsylvanian shales. Exploration and development of these complex and stacked reservoirs relies in large part on the geological understanding of the reservoir for accurate placement of horizontal wells as well as the implementation of efficient production practices. The 23 chapters included in this volume provide detailed accounts of particular reservoirs, fields, processes, and problems in the Mississippian-aged reservoirs of the midcontinent of the United States. These studies, which encompass a diverse and integrated approach and methodology, including biostratigraphy, chemostratigraphy, sequence stratigraphy, petrophysics, and seismic interpretation and modeling, provide both a framework for exploration and development and an insight into potential workflows that may be used to better understand similar complex reservoirs worldwide.