Applied Geochemistry Projects (Summons, Bowring)

Industry-related research projects in the Summons' lab are two-fold. One project has just been initiated with Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) who seek to better understand the sources of hydrocarbons in the South Oman Salt Basin. Changes in the abundance and quality of sedimentary organic matter though time will be evaluated in the context of revisions to regional stratigraphy and sedimentary facies relationships for intra- and pre-salt source (terminal Proterozoic-earliest Cambrian) rocks. This will allow us to determine whether or not pre-salt source rocks make appreciable contributions to any petroleum accumulations. We will also conduct a detailed organic chemostratigraphy including analysis of biomarkers and their individual isotopic compositions. This will be integrated with traditional chemostratigraphies (13Ccarb +18Ocarb + trace elements) to determine whether or not there are special circumstances connecting the Huqf petroleum system(s) to global tectonic, paleoceanographic and biological evolutionary changes leading up to an across the Proterozoic-Paleozoic transition.

In a second project, a small consortium of Houston-based oil companies has funded a geochemical database project with GeoMark Research Inc., part of which will be subcontracted to our lab. It is an ideal project for a new graduate student. GeoMark have been constructing a database of the biomarker compositions of more than 4000 crude oils. At MIT, we will be searching this database for trends that reflect the changing composition of crude oil through geological time. This will be evaluated to what we know about the evolution of environment and biota through the same interval.

In the MIT Geochronology Laboratory, Prof. S. Bowring's group has been actively involved in the calibration of key biogeochemical events in absolute time using U-Pb zircon geochronology. A new project has just been initiated in collaboration with J. Grotzinger, R. Summons and Petroleum Development Oman. The imposition of absolute ages on a relative chronostratigraphy, created through delineation of regionally-continuous geochemical anomalies, will allow thermal models of source rock maturation to be refined, in addition to creating the basis for independent testing of geochemically-based correlations, and providing a dynamic framework for basin tectonic models.