Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

The oil sands of Alberta place Canada second in global oil reserves: yet despite the intense focus of technology on exploiting these deposits, many questions remain concerning the origins, timing and nature of oil emplacement.  The Western Desert of Egypt is a major hydrocarbon system sourced by Jurassic and Cretaceous shales, but its burial history is poorly known, at least within the published literature.  Funds are sought for a versatile, cost-effective, transmitted/incident-light microscope work station that will quantify the burial history of these two economically important regions, and generally within the Western Interior Basin of North America, by measuring the optical characteristics of the contained organic material. Oil and gas exploration requires detailed knowledge of the thermal history of any prospective basin, as organic material in the rock must undergo heating to liberate hydrocarbons. The geothermal gradient alone can be sufficient to generate this heat.  Determining whether potential source rocks have undergone sufficient heating during burial is therefore a key element in assessing the prospects of a sedimentary basin. Certain organic particles in modern sediments (esp. pollen, spores, dinoflagellate cysts) will autofluoresce when excited by blue/ultraviolet light.  Other particles (vitrinite) are coally in nature and reflect incident light.  With increasing burial (and heat), autofluorescence decreases in intensity and shifts to lower frequencies, and vitrinite increases in reflectivity.  These changes are progressive, allowing the thermal maturity of a sedimentary basin to be quantified.  The requested equipment represents a cost- and time-efficient microscope system utilizing autofluorescence and vitrinite reflectance measured by video imagery and software analysis. Use will be extended to palynofacies analysis and critical research on modern and fossil dinoflagellate cysts. Within the Canadian academic sector, these analyses are apparently available only through the GSC-Calgary, a facility overwhelmed with orders from universities and industry across Canada.  The current proposal addresses a crucial demand, with a facility at Brock University fulfilling needs within central Canada and beyond.