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Unconventional Petroleum Geology by Caineng Zou Energy resources are fundamental to the social and economic development of modern

society. Inevitably, owing to the increasing demand for energy resources in the world, the volatility of oil prices, and the social and environmental demand for a low-carbon economy, today we are faced with the need to make a rapid shift from fossil fuels to alternative energy resources and from conventional to unconventional petroleum resources. Therefore, the petroleum industry faces challenges of converting the currently unconventional petroleum resources to future conventional ones in order to prolong the life cycle of the oil industry. Already 1 ! years of the global petroleum industry"s pro#ected $!!-year life span have passed. The petroleum industry has undergone three ma#or stages of development% e&ploration and e&ploitation of structural traps' lithostratigraphic traps' and continuous unconventional accumulations through two key theoretical breakthroughs and technological innovations. The first breakthrough is a shift from drilling easy-to-find structural traps to e&ploring subtle lithostratigraphic accumulations, concentrating primarily on delineating traps. The second is a search for lithostratigraphic traps to develop continuous unconventional oil and gas, which lack well-defined reservoir boundaries. The global oil and gas industry is appro&imately $!! years old, and during this time the e&ploration targets have shifted focus from structural petroleum deposits to lithostratigraphic petroleum deposits to unconventional petroleum accumulations. (il and gas deposits occur in isolated, clustered, or continuous accumulations. The first significant e&ploration shift was to move from isolated structural deposits to clustered lithostratigraphic deposits and to determine how to discover and define lithostratigraphic traps. The second shift was to transfer focus from lithostratigraphic deposits to unconventional petroleum accumulations. The key concepts here were to define favorable reservoirs by going beyond the conventional thinking of lower physical property limits and lithostratigraphic or structural traps. According to the statistics of the ).*. +eological *urvey ,)*+*- and the ).*. .epartment of Energy ,.(E-, the global resources of unconventional oil are //0 1!1 t, which is close to that of conventional oil. The production of unconventional oil in 2!!1 was more than 3!!! 1!/ t, which is nearly two times that produced in 2!!1. The global resources of unconventional gas are $021 1!12 m$, which is eight times that of conventional gas, and its production has accounted for 114 of total natural gas production. As future e&ploration targets, unconventional petroleum resources are becoming increasingly important in the global energy structure. In this chapter, the history of petroleum geology is first reviewed, and then the characteristics, status, and significance of unconventional petroleum resources are discussed. 5isit our site to download http%66goo.gl67+cac$

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