A comprehensive review concerning the problem of marine crudes sources in Tarim Basin

The issue of source of oil/gas in the platform basin area in Tarim Basin has been debated for a long time, and the debate is focused on whether the marine oil/gas resources that have been discovered in the basin were originated from hydrocarbon source rocks in the Cambrian-Lower Ordovician or in the Mid-Upper Ordovician. In this paper a summary was made in regard to the major points and supporting data by the predecessors, and a discussion was conducted toward the core issues related to the study on the oil source in the Tarim Basin area, such as choice of correlation parameters, influence of maturation and physical differentiation on oil source correlation parameters, and geological and geochemical significance of these relevant correlation indices. It is quite probable that different interpretation results could arise from the oil source correlation due to choice of parameters severely affected by the thermal maturation and physical differentiation effect, and insisted that only those parameters that come with clearly defined geochemical significance and are less affected by thermal maturation and variations occurring during secondary evolution process are valid ones. The marine crude in Tarim Basin covers contributions that were originated from two sets of hydrocarbon source rocks as mentioned above but dominated by the one from the Mid-Upper Ordovician hydrocarbon source rocks. Here oil of mixed sources occurs extensively, and crude from Cambrian sources was also discovered. It is suggested that for further study on the origin of marine crudes in Tarim Basin, the parameters used for correlation of oil sources shall be optimized, and a comprehensive set of geological and geochemical methods shall be adopted for this purpose.