Introducing a Novel Approach for Oil‐Oil Correlation based on Asphaltene Structure: X‐ray Diffraction

Abstract

Oil-oil correlation is a widely-known concept in geochemical studies, defined as finding geochemical relevance between oil samples (Dembicki, 2016). There is a striking principle which indicates that every oil sample can preserve its chemical characteristic throughout the passage of time. This property, referred to as a fingerprint, can be used for distinguishing differences between one oil sample and others, or detecting similarities between oil samples of a genetic family (Christensen and Tomasi, 2007;Speight, 2014;Hashemi-Nasab and Parastar, 2019). One of the most significant applications of oil-oil correlation is determining the number of active source rocks in a given study area. This can be achieved by identifying existing genetically-distinct oil families in the basin (Dembicki, 2016). Oil-oil correlation also plays a vital role in basin modeling and reconstruction of the burial history of basin sediments (Soltani et al., 2019), as well as precise characterization of the petroleum system