White Tiger oil field

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The White Tiger oilfield is located offshore of Vietnam.

The White Tiger oilfield is often erroneously ^[1]cited as evidence that abiogenic petroleum has been found in granite. Thus it has wrongly been used as an example that the orthodox view of the biological origin of petroleum is false and that Russian theory of mantle oil proposed by Nikolai Kudryavtsev is proved.

White Tiger is not the only oil field convincingly shown to be hosted in granite; however, inspection of the seismic profile of the area shows faulted basement passive margin which is sealed by an onlapping sedimentary sequence. ^[2]

It is plausible that the oil has migrated laterally from the lowermost, mature sediments into the fault systems within the granite. The CuuLong seismic profile shows a definite basement horst with onlapping sedimentary source rocks, draped by a reservoir seal. The orthodox trap view would see the oil migrate up the horst bounding faults from the lower source units, into the trap unit draped over the top.

The White Tiger field was developed by the Russian government entity Petrosov, in the 1980s and 1990s, in consultation with Vietnam using the methodology of abiogenic oil^{[citation needed]}. . However upon examination of the source rock and oil content, petrogeologists have emphasized that the oil's components indicate a lacustrine organic facies with lipid-rich, land-plant debris and fresh-water algal material, refuting theories of abiogenic origin in this area^[3].