Kang Guang-xing, Xu Xue-min, Wang Shuang-qing, Yang Jia-jia, Sun Wei-lin, Shen Bin, Qin Jing, Lu Ran, Zhang Xiao-tao, Guo Wang
Shale gas resources are abundant in the Lower Paleozoic shales in southern China,which are of very old age,high maturity and are lack of vitrinite,and thus lead to a technical problem for evaluating the thermal evolution degree of organic matter in them.Previous studies have shown that the H/C and O/C atomic ratios of kerogen decrease regularly with the increase of its maturity,but there is little research on high maturity stage kerogens,or kerogens lack of virinite,therefore,it remains unclear that how their element evolves and does the evolution of element composition quantitatively reflect to RO value? These are worthy of study.For this purpose,a series of simulation experiments of thermal evolution of kerogen have been carried out at temperatures ranging from 350℃ to 550℃ with Paleozoic source rocks,and the RO value and C,H,O composition of the kerogens were determined.The results show that: (1)to calibrate thermal evolution degree of kerogen of the Middle-Upper Proterozoic and Lower Paleozoic source rocks lack of vitrinite,coal with similar maturity to the source rock can be used by reacting together with the source rock throughout the thermal simulation experiment process,and it is efficient;(2) H/C and O/C atomic ratios of kerogen correlate highly to its maturity by exhibiting a consistent decrease of H/C atomic ratio with the increase of thermal maturity for all types of kerogens,whereas O/C atomic ratio decreases separately along individual paths for types Ⅰ,Ⅱ and Ⅲ kerogens with the increase of thermal maturity that meets at last at a high maturity with RO value around 3.5%;(3) there is a mathematical correlation betwe en H/C and O/C atomic ratios of kerogen (RH/C and RO/C) and the thermal maturity of organic matter characterized by vitrinite reflectance (RO) can be expressed as LgRO=0.133 1-1.190 5 LgRH/C-0.054 4 LgRO/C,which is suitable for all types of kerogens.