Home – Home – Jornals – Russian Geology and Geophysics 2006 number 9

Analysis of a sample of 18 relatively well-explored sedimentary basins of North America shows that the distribution of oil fields with regard to amount of resources depend on the characteristics of the sedimentary filling of the basins. In rather young and intensely sagged basins, which abound in objects with high rates of accumulation, the deviations from the truncated Pareto distribution can be quite significant. The revealed dependences permit the parameters of size distribution of oil accumulations to be estimated at the very beginning of study of basins, without sufficient information on sizes of largest fields. The obtained empirical regularities qualitatively agree with results of analysis of the available simplest theoretical model for size distribution of hydrocarbon accumulations in petroliferous systems.