18 - Trapping Styles

Summary

This chapter describes how structural and stratigraphic architectures involving reservoirs combined with seals represent hydrocarbon traps and control their structural, stratigraphic, or combined character in strike-slip and transform margin settings. It talks about their characteristics. Structural traps evolve with their controlling strike-slip faults that develop as not steady-state features in the continental lithosphere. The trap geometry develops in response to controlling mechanical stratigraphy and local stress field undergoing constant changes. Different structural traps in the same mature strike-slip fault zone may have been developed in different stages of its development. Older ones may have been modified during the younger stages of the strike-slip fault or subsequent event. Some structural traps can be associated with the strike-slip fault itself, others with its horse-tail structures, some with the region between the two interacting strike-slip faults, others with the tectonic setting hosting the strike-slip fault, modified by the interaction of the hosting setting with developing strike-slip fault. The environment where the strike-slip fault develops may have its own suite of pre-existing traps that get modified by the strike-slip-related deformation.