Change of deltaic depositional environment and its impacts on reservoir properties—A braided delta in South China Sea

• We describe a delta deposition that evolved from river-dominated into tide-dominated environment in the South China Sea.
• Depositional change leads to significant changes in facies and spatial distribution of rock properties.
• Early fluvial environment resulted in a fluvial-dominated delta plain and many lingual-mouth sand bars in the delta front.
• Finger sand bars deposited abundantly in the delta front as a result of the tidal and wave influences at a late stage.

Depositional environment can change through geological time. This paper describes a delta that evolved from river-dominated into tide-dominated. The delta is located in the Ya13-1 field of the South China Sea. Understanding the change that occurred in the deltaic setting is important because the change in depositional environments led to changes in spatial distribution of facies and other rock properties.The Oligocene sediments of the third member of the Lingshui Formation in the Ya13-1 field were deposited in a river-dominated delta, and later impacted by marine flooding, fluvial and tidal currents. As a result of these different influences, the early-stage depositional micro-facies and the sandbody distributions are quite different from those of the later stage. At the early stage, fluvial influences prevailed, resulting in a fluvial-dominated delta plain and deposition of many linguoid sand bars in the delta front. During the late stage of deposition, tide-dominated delta fronts were developed extensively and finger sand bars deposited abundantly in the delta front as a result of the tidal influence.Ya13-1 gas field is laterally divided into two large subareas and vertically into eight stratigraphic packages. Because of the different influences of marine flooding that resulted in different interbeds and intercalations, the number of stratigraphic packages in the south is different from that in the north. The change of deltaic depositional environments also resulted in different reservoir properties between the northern and southern regions as the reservoir properties of mouth bars are generally better than distributary channels. These depositional characteristics significantly impact the development of the field.