Initiated by the Northwest Territories Geoscience Office, the project Regional Geoscience Studies and Petroleum Potential, Peel Plateau and Plain, Northwest Territories and Yukon (2005 to 2009) involved partners from the Yukon Geological Survey, Geological Suvey of Canada, as well as universities and industry. The research team coupled field-based studies with subsurface analytical techniques to evaluate the study area's hydrocarbon potential. Over 70 interim publications have been produced. This volume compiles chapters devoted to several stratigraphic petroleum plays, along with structural and petroleum systems elements and a digital geodatabase (or atlas) of spatially based data collected during the course of the project . The result is a comprehensive body of geoscience work for Peel area which will be useful too in oil and gas exploration and for regional land use and business planning endeavours.

The Eagle Plain basin and its environs is a potentially prospective petroleum province in Yukon. Extensive initial exploration in this area, focused on discovering crude oil, identified 83.7 Bcf of natural gas and 11.05 MMbbls of crude oil, throughout the succession and across the geographic extent of the basin. This study differs significantly from previous estimates of undiscovered potential, which were less optimistic. Intriguing plays exist associated with the stratigraphic opportunities for entrapment in Paleozoic carbonates against the Richardson Trough, but these appear to be higher risk/reward targets than the continued exploration of the uppermost Paleozoic succession. Additional conceptual play concepts, including those in the Devonian Imperial and Jurassic Porcupine River formations, which have indications of petroleum occurrence, were not quantitatively assessed.

Peel Plateau and the contiguous east flank of the Richardson Mountains, northeastern Yukon, comprise a relatively unexplored but prospective petroleum basin. Within the Devonian succession of this basin, shale rocks of unit ‘Cf’ are little known, but may have the potential to form an important conventional source and/or unconventional reservoir target. Unit ‘Cf’ is dominated by thick intervals of dark grey to black, siliceous, organic-rich marine shale, together with intercalated siltstone and very fine grained sandstone beds. Although unit ‘Cf’ has been mapped at surface on the eastern flank of the Richardson Mountains, it is not known whether it occurs to the east in the Peel Plateau and Plain subsurface. A correlation of this unit to the Ford Lake Shale (‘CF’ map unit), which occurs to the west in Eagle Plain and Kandik basins, has been implied. In this study, unit ‘Cf’ was assessed for lithology, mineralogy, age and hydrocarbon source and reservoir rock potential, including type and quantity of organic matter and thermal maturity. Common organic geochemical analytical techniques were utilized (including Rock-Eval pyrolysis and optical microscopy), together with X-ray diffraction (XRD) to determine shale mineralogy and age determination by palynology. Outcrop characteristics were then utilized to identify unit ‘Cf’ in four subsurface Yukon wells: H-37, N-25, I-21 and A-42.

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