| Abstract |
The zone reaching approximately 100 km to the west of Fort McMurray, here referred to as the “Athabasca region”, hosts a significant fraction of Alberta’s bitumen resources contained in both oil sands and carbonates. This area has not been developed yet significantly, however, in part due to its relative isolation from existing infrastructure and due to uncertainties associated with in situ production from the carbonates. However, interest in these resources has accelerated in recent years and currently there are some tests and one major pilot project now underway. The smaller scale of proposed projects in this area together with the lack of existing infrastructure makes this area a good target for either EGS or Conventional Geothermal system developments. In the way of achieving the goal of construction of a regional geological/ geophysical model for this area consisting of relatively thin layers of sediments overlying the Precambrian metamorphic rocks of the Canadian Shield, over 50 2-D seismic lines (over 600 km) and High Resolution Aeromagnetic (HRAM) data (in total 22,508 km2) and well-log data (from 511 wells) were obtained, this data represents upwards of $3M in-kind industry support. The present paper is focusing on integration and interpretation progress of these data sets. The ambiguity of separate interpretations of each individual set of these three data categories drops dramatically with combining them. As an example, while HRAM data is a good assessment to map intra-sedimentary and basement faulting, interpreting scattered 2-D seismic lines gives us the choice for fault correlation. |