Lithologic and environmental atlas of Berea sandstone (Mississippian) in the Appalachian Basin

The Berea Sandstone occurs throughout much of the Appalachian Basin where it is an oil and gas reservoir and is quarried as a building stone. Because of its uniform porosity and permeability in the quarries at South Amherst, Ohio, it has been used by petroleum engineers in North America as a "model" reservoir sandstone. Currently, the Berea is locally classified as a "tight gas sand." This report has described 6 outcrops and 22 cores of the Berea. These descriptions are accompanied by wireline logs of the Berea section in the core holes and gamma-ray profiles of outcrops to help explorationists, reservoir geologists, and petroleum engineers better interpret the lithology and depositional environments represented by the many thousands of wireline logs in the Appalachian Basin. This study contains a brief review of the depositional environments likely to occur in the Berea, illustrates the various sedimentary structures of the Berea that can be seen in both outcrops and cores, carefully documents vertical profiles of grain size and sedimentary structures, and concludes with a summary of resolved problems.