A recent work on the deposition and preservation of organic matter in sedimentary basins was published in Geosciences

Deposition and preservation of organic matter in sedimentary basins is a major concern for petroleum exploration. The main controlling factors of these mechanisms are still the object of vivid debates for which new modeling tools can bring very valuable insight. For that purpose, IFP Energies nouvelles, our partner for R&D in basin analysis, developed a new tool to account for deposition and preservation of organic matter in sedimentary bassins called DORS, which stands for Dionisos Organic Rich Sediments (project led by Benoit Chauveau).

As part of his Ph.D. funded by Engie and oriented by François Baudin and Isabelle Moretti, Benjamin Bruneau worked on the Paris Basin, a very well documented example of marine organic matter accumulation, to better understand the mechanisms driving the formation of source-rocks using DORS. He also benefited from the results obtained by Marc Villié during his master thesis to regionally discriminate the relative importance of the processes involved by using statistical tools dedicated to exploration studies (project led by Mathieu Ducros).

Regional relative contribution of the factors controlling deposition and preservation
of organic matter in the Toracian source-rock of the Paris Basin (Bruneau et al., 2018)

This work, which can be freely accessed on the website of the review, opens new perspectives about the understanding of global distribution of organic-rich sediments.