World Atlas of Oil and Gas Basins

Guoyu Li

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780470656617
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781444390056
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Chemical & Biochemical Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Professor Li's World Atlas of Oil and Gas Basins is a fresh and comprehensive treatise of the distribution of the world's hydrocarbon reserves. The Atlas highlights the geographical, sedimentary and geological features of the basins, using a combination of maps and stratigraphic diagrams to depict the history, prospectivity and commercial production capacity of the reserves on a continental and country-by-country basis. 
 
The Atlas is an essential reference source for petroleum geologists and reservoir engineers working in hydrocarbon exploration and production. It is also a valuable and original teaching aid for university graduate and postgraduate courses.
 
The Atlas provides a welcome addition to the global database of the world's energy resources and is therefore an indispensable source of information for the formulation of future strategies to exploit oil and gas reserves.
 
Written by one of China's foremost petroleum geologists, the Atlas provides a rare analysis of the industry from the perspective of the country whose demand for oil and gas is set to become the largest in the next few decades. It is an important and vital scholarly work.

Part I

Overview

WORLD TOPOGRAPHY CHAPTER 1

1 World Topography

Oceans and continents

Earth has an area of about 510 million km² (197 million square miles). Of this total, approximately 360 million km² (140 million square miles), or 71 per cent, are represented by oceans and marginal seas. The continents comprise the remaining 29 per cent, or 150 million km² (58 million square miles).

Land With an average altitude of about 875 m, land can be classified into continents, islands and peninsula. There are six mainland masses, namely: Eurasia, Africa, North America and South America, Antarctic, and Australia. Islands that are located near each other are called an archipelago.

Oceans Oceans refer to broad and continuous bodies of saline (salty) water on the Earth’s surface. They are 3795 m deep on average. There are four oceans on Earth, namely, the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian and the Arctic. Seas are the smaller subdivisions of oceans. The largest sea in the world is the Coral Sea located off northeastern Australia with an area of 4.79 million km² . Seas can be further divided into marginal seas, inland seas and intercontinental seas. Inland seas refer to those seas that extend onto mainland masses and which may connect with marginal seas or even with oceans by narrow waterways. The Bohai Sea and the Baltic Sea are illustrations of this type. A third common type of sea, the intercontinental, separates two or more continental land masses. The Mediterranean Sea is an example of this type.

Land and submarine topography

Land The surface of the Earth varies greatly in height and morphology. Using these two features as defining parameters, land presents itself in five forms: plains, mountains, plateaus, hills and basins.

A plain is a broad area of land with relatively low relief that has no cliffs at its edges. Plains are mostly less than 200 m in altitude and account for just under 35 per cent of the total land area. The largest plain in the world is the Amazon with an area of about 5.6 million km² .

Mountains are often spectacular features that rise several hundred metres or more above the surrounding terrain. Mountainous areas have large altitudinal variations, steep slopes and great heights. Linearly extensive mountains are called mountain ranges. Adjacent mountain ranges that share similar genesis are called mountain systems. These ranges are mostly distributed in two main belts in the world. One belt comprises the south–north trending coastlines along both sides of the Pacific Ocean. It runs continuously from the tip of South America through Alaska, to ranges in Asia, the coastlines along Oceania as well as the Pacific Ocean, and islands outside marginal seas. The other is a belt that runs generally in an east–west direction, traversing Asia, southern Europe and northern Africa. This belt includes ranges in Java Island and Sumatra, the Himalayas, the Alps in southern Europe, and the Atlas in northwestern Africa.

Ranges in the above-mentioned belts are typically grand in scope and possess high peaks of above 4000–5000 m. There are 14 peaks with altitude of above 8000 m, most of them are distributed in the Karakorum and the Himalayas Ranges in Asia. Among these peaks, the Qumolangma (Everest) in the Himalayas at an altitude of 8848 m is the highest point in the world.

Plateaus refer to areas with moderately high elevations and relatively flat surfaces and edged by steep cliffs. The world’s highest plateau is China’s Tibetan Plateau with an area of 2.2 million km² and an average altitude of 4500 m. The world largest plateau in area is the Brazil Plateau (Mato Grosso) in South America. Its area is about 5 million km² .

A basin is a depression in the landscape, typically below the surrounding area, such as Sichuan Basin in China and the Congo Basin in Africa.

Submarine landforms The Earth’s surface waters tend to obscure the true nature of submarine landforms. It is known that the submarine topography fluctuates as much as the visible landforms above sea level. Submarine topography can be described as consisting of the continental shelf, the continental slope and the ocean floor.

The continental shelf accounts for approximately 7.5 per cent of the Earth’s total sea area. The continental slope is defined as the transitional belt between the continental shelf and the ocean floor. This type of slope is the world’s largest. It has gentle inclines and relatively shallow water depths which would typically be no more than 200 m. There are, however, exceptions of up to 500–600 m. The difference in submarine elevation from the continental shelf to the base of the continental slope is about 3,000 m. The continental slope makes up about 12 per cent of the Earth’s total sea area.

The ocean floor (also known as the seabed) typically refers to the extension of the continental slope and other continental margin features, such as the continental rise below sea level. the ocean floor is the main physical feature of the Earth’s oceans, with depths of between 3000 m and 6000 m. In area, the ocean floor accounts for approximately 80 per cent of the Earth’s total sea area.

Submarine topographical features vary greatly, with several different physical features such as ocean ridges, marine basins, ocean trenches, sea knolls, seamounts, and submarine plateaus, to name just a few.

WORLD POLITICAL MAP CHAPTER 2

2 World Political Map

There are 199 countries and regions in the world, but oil and gas is produced in only 90. Oil production exceeds 100 million t per annum in 13 of these countries (Table 2.1), but the majority of these countries produce low amounts of oil. By the end of 2008, only 12 of them played an important role in the world, with their annual production exceeding 100 million t. According to the statistics of 2008, the oil production of these 12 oil-producing countries was, in order of highest output: Russia, 488 million t; Saudi Arabia, 445 million t; USA, 245 million t; Iran, 195 million t; China, 190 million t; Mexico, 140 million t; Canada, 128 million t; United Arab Emirates (UAE), 122 million t; Iraq, 118 million t; Venezuela, 117 million t; Kuwait, 116 million t; and Norway, 108 million t (Grant and Middleton, 1987).

Another statistical method commonly used in the industry is to classify production on a ‘per well per day basis’. This classification provides some insight into the commercial productivity of various geological basins and oil reservoirs. Using this method, oil-producing countries can be classified into three categories: the high production countries with oil production exceeding 100 t, the medium production countries with oil production ranging from 10 to 100 t, and the low production countries with oil production less than 10 t (Table 2.2).

These figures confirm the exceptionally high per-well-production features of Saudi Arabia, Norway and Iran in particular, who are among the leading producers in the world. In marked contrast, other major producers such as Venezuela and Russia rank only among the medium production countries. The most notable low production countries are China, Canada and the USA

These statistics have implications for long-term reservoir depletion and maintenance of reservoir integrity in many cases. However, drawing meaningful general conclusions would be a very difficult task given the wide disparity in production completion technology, production drive mechanisms, production age distribution, geographical location and distribution of individual wells as well as prevailing national field development policies and regulations.

Table 2.1 Classification of 90 oil producers in the world in 2007 (by production)

Table 2.2 Oil production per well per day in typical countries in 2007

GEOLOGICAL MAP OF THE CONTINENTS CHAPTER 3

3 Geological Map of the Continents

The geological map of the world continents is based on Tarbuck and Lutgens (1995). Sedimentary rocks account for only about of 5 per cent (by volume) of the Earth’s outer 16 km, about 75 per cent of all rocks that crop out on the continents are sedimentary.

Dietz and Holden (1970) have carefully recorded the gross details of the migrations of individual continents over the past 500 million years. By extrapolating plate motion back in time using evidence such as the orientation of volcanic structures left behind on moving plates (e.g. Fig. 3.1), the distribution and movements of transform faults, and palaeomagnetism they were able to reconstruct Pangaea (see Fig. 3.2).

The fragmentation of Pangaea began about 180 million years ago. Figure 3.2 illustrates the breakup and subsequent paths taken by the landmasses involved. As we can see in Figure 3.2A, two major rifts initiated the breakup. The rift zone between North America and Africa generated numerous outpourings of Jurassic age basalts which are presently visible along the eastern seaboard of the USA. Radiometric dating of these basalts indicates that rifting occurred between 180 and 135 million years ago. This date can be used as the birth date of this section of the North Atlantic. The rift that formed in the southern landmass of Gondwanaland developed a ‘Y’-shaped fracture which sent India on a northward journey and simultaneously separated South America–Africa from Australia–Antarctica.

Figure 3.2B illustrates the position of the continents 135 million years ago, about the time Africa and South America began splitting apart to form the South Atlantic. India can be seen halfway into its journey to Asia, and the southern portion of the North Atlantic has widened considerably. By the end of the Cretaceous Period, about 65 million years ago, Madagascar had separated from Africa, and the South Atlantic had emerged as a full-fledged ocean (Figure 3.2C).

The cur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Editorial Board
• About the author
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• The Geological Time Scale
• Key to Maps
• Part I Overview
• Part II Asian Oil and Gas Basins
• Part III African Oil and Gas Basins
• Part IV European Oil and Gas Basins
• Part V North American Oil and Gas Basins
• Part VI South American Oil and Gas Basins
• Part VII Australasia and the Poles
• References
• Index of Countries
• Index of Basins