Assessment of global unconventional oil and gas resources

Abstract

This paper evaluates the recoverable unconventional oil and gas resources around the world, reveals main controlling factors and potential regions for the rich accumulation of unconventional oil and gas, and standardizes the classification of seven types of resources (i.e., heavy oil, oil sand, tight oil, oil shale, shale gas, tight gas, and coalbed methane). By virtue of commercial databases for global petroliferous basins, together with single-well data packages in North America and basic data of exploration and development of Chinese companies in unconventional oil and gas resources blocks around the world, contour maps of abundance for global recoverable resources are formed through spatial graphic interpolation of key assessment parameters of seven types of unconventional oil and gas resources on the Geographic Information System (GIS) platform, which systematically evaluate the potential of seven types of unconventional oil and gas resources. The assessment reveals: (1) These seven types of resources around the world are distributed predominantly in 476 formations in 363 petroliferous basins. (2) Total recoverable unconventional oil and gas resources in the world are respectively 442.1 billion tons and 227 trillion cubic meters. (3) Unconventional oil and gas resources can be divided into “source-bound type” and “strata-bound type”. The “source-bound type” resources are mainly controlled by 6 groups of high-quality source rock around the world, among which, the tight oil and gas resources are featured by the “integration of reservoir and source”, presenting the best prospect for the development and application, and the “strata-bound type” oil sand and heavy oil resources, controlled by the transformation of the late structure, are mainly distributed in the slope belt of the Mesozoic-Cenozoic basins, presenting a good prospect for the resource development and application in the shallow layers. (4) Besides hot spots in North America, tight oil in the West Siberia Basin and the Neuquen Basin as well as heavy oil in the Arab Basin will become potential targets for the development of unconventional oil and gas resources in the future. Key words: unconventional oil and gas, resources assessment, assessment parameters, assessment methods, recoverable resources, main control factors of enrichment