Preservation of Anomalously High Porosity in Deeply Buried Sandstones by Grain-Coating Chlorite: Examples from the Norwegian Continental Shelf

ABSTRACT Five Lower to Middle Jurassic sandstone reservoirs from the Norwegian sector provide examples of deep porosity preservation caused by grain-coating, authigenic chlorite. Wide porosity variations in clean sandstones correlate with an abundance of grain-coating chlorite and consequent inhibition of quartz cementation. Maximum porosities tend to decrease with increasing depth but generally are 10–15% higher than would be predicted from regional trends of mean porosity vs. depth. It is proposed in this paper that the high chlorite content of the porous zones reflects syndepositional concentration of Fe-rich marine clays analogous to minerals of the modern verdine facies. Fe-clay mineralization would have been localized where Fe-rich river water was discharged into the sea. The syndepositional clays were transformed during burial diagenesis into grain coatings of radially oriented chlorite crystals. Petrographic relationships indicate that these coatings grew mainly before the beginning of quartz cementation and feldspar grain dissolution (probably within the first 2 km of burial) but after grain contacts had become adjusted by mechanical compaction. The Norwegian examples demonstrate that a wide range of nearshore marine sand-body types is susceptible to chlorite mineralization. The distribution of anomalous porosity and the proportion of the net sand affected depend upon sedimentary facies architecture and the pattern of discharge of Fe-rich river water during sand deposition.