The study of high-carbon formations was instigated both by the decreasing raw material base of oil as a result of its extraction, and by the progress in development of low-permeability shale strata, primarily in the USA, Australia, and China. The most valuable formations occur in traditional hydrocarbon production areas – the West Siberian, Volga-Ural and Timan-Pechora, North Pre-Caucasian and Lena-Tunguska oil and gas provinces. Specific features of the Late Devonian-Early Carboniferous high-carbon formation occurring in the eastern marginal part of the East European Platform are: heterogeneous section due to intense progradation of the carbonate platform from west to east; succession of lithofacies environments that determined the unevenness of the primary accumulation and secondary distribution of organic matter (OM); possible migration or preservation in the source strata during the subsidence stages of the moving parts of bitumides, which determined the prospects for oil and gas potential. The distribution pattern of the present OM content was investigated depending on lithofacies conditions and lithological composition of rocks in the “Domanik type” Upper Devonian-Tournaisian deposits in the Timan-Pechora Province (TPP), its transformation degree to bring it to the initial content of organic carbon and further estimation of the share of stored “mobile oil” in oil and gas source formation. The study was based on the analysis of the data set on organic carbon content in core samples and natural exposures in the Ukhta Region in the Domanik-Tournaisian part of the section including more than 5,000 determinations presented in reports and publications of VNIGRI and VNIGNI and supplemented by pyrolytic and bituminological analyses associated with the results of microtomographic, macro- and lithological studies and descriptions of thin sections made at the Saint Petersburg Mining University. For each tectonic zone of the TPP within the investigated high-carbon intervals, the content of total volumes of organic carbon was determined. The data obtained allow estimating the residual mass of mobile bitumoids in a low-permeability matrix of the high-carbon formation.
Comprehensive interpretation of the results for regional seismic operations and reinterpretation of archived seismic data, their correlation with the drilling data of more than 30 deep wells, including Severo-Novoborsk parametric well, made it possible to clarify the structural maps and thickness maps of all seismic facies structures developed in the territory and water area in the junction of the north of Izhma-Pechora depression and Malozemelsko-Kolguevsk monocline of Timan-Pechora oil and gas province. Data obtained were used at basin modeling in TemisFlow software in order to reconstruct the conditions of submersion and transformation of organic substance in potential oil and gas bearing formations. Modeling made it possible to get an idea of the time and conditions for the formation of large zones of possible hydrocarbons accumulation, to establish space-time connections with possible sources of generation, to identify the directions of migration and on the basis of comparison with periods of intense generation, both from directly located within the operation area and outside them (taking into account possible migration), to identify zones of paleoaccumulation of oil and gas. Work performed made it possible to outline promising oil and gas accumulation zones and identify target objects for further exploration within the site with an ambiguous forecast and lack of industrial oil and gas potential.
