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Petroleum Accumulation: from Continuous to Discontinuous
Author(s) -
ZHAO Jingzhou,
CAO Qing,
BAI Yubin,
ER Chuang,
LI Jun,
WU Weitao,
SHEN Wuxian
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
acta geologica sinica ‐ english edition
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.444
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1755-6724
pISSN - 1000-9515
DOI - 10.1111/1755-6724.12305_2
Subject(s) - petroleum , petroleum engineering , environmental science , economics , geology , paleontology
Petroleum accumulations from the Earth’s crust can be grouped into conventional and unconventional ones. The history of the world’s petroleum exploration is a history from the exploration of conventional accumulations to that of unconventional ones. Nevertheless, petroleum accumulation is actually a contrary process starting from unconventional (continuous) accumulation and ending in conventional (discontinuous) accumulation. In reality, with regard to the accumulations derived from a same hydrocarbon kitchen, conventional accumulation and unconventional accumulation are closely related and constitute an organically related unity. Nevertheless, many previous studies concerning petroleum accumulation are only focused on part of the process, while analyses of the entire process and all-round distribution of petroleum accumulation are lacking. Hence, to study petroleum accumulation and distribution, it is necessary to take the entire process covering both conventional and unconventional accumulation into consideration so as to enhance the accuracy of prediction for hydrocarbon distribution. Based on an extensive investigation and comprehensive study of conventional and unconventional accumulations, we demonstrated that petroleum accumulation is a process from continuous to discontinuous accumulation and three types of accumulation are thus resulted from this process, namely continuous, quasi-continuous and discontinuous accumulations, which represent the basic types of petroleum accumulation in the Earth’s crust.