An illustrative map showing petroleum production sites and their respective generalized petroleum basins occurring globally. In the map, “Oil Production Site” means the oil drills from where petroleum is recovered from the earth surface. And “Oil Field Basin” means a system of source and reservoir rocks where petroleum was formed, migrated and trapped. Click on the Oil Production Sites (red circles) or the Oil Field Basins (orange polygons) to know details about them.
Map Source and Credits:
- Oil Production Sites (Point data): Giant Oil and Gas Fields of the World (Compiled by M.K. Horn)
- Generalised Oil Field Basins (Polygonals): Drawn by Vinod Rowmuria, author of this blog site, taking reference from petroleum geology literatures.
What is this Map about?
Today’s world economy is driven by crude oil and the petroleum industry. Petroleum is the main source of energy till date and it is essential to maintain the present industrial civilization. Many industries run on petroleum products. And therefore its availability is a critical concern for many nations worldwide. The world has seen many wars because of this black gold.Have you wondered how and where on this earth petroleum is produced? Going back to some basic geology, petroleum is a naturally occurring hydrocarbon material that is believed to have formed from animal and vegetable debris buried in deep sedimentary rock beds for millions of years. The petroleum, being less dense than the surrounding water, was expelled from the source beds and migrated upward through porous rock such as sandstone and some limestone until it was finally blocked by nonporous rock such as shale or dense limestone. In this way, petroleum deposits came to be trapped by geologic features caused by the folding, faulting, and erosion of the Earth’s crust. See the image below to understand the five ways how petroleum reservoirs are formed in the earth crust.
Petroleum is recovered mostly through oil drilling in the earth crust. Although natural petroleum springs or seepages are also found but such occurrences are very rare. Oil drilling comes after the studies of structural geology at the reservoir scale, sedimentary basin analysis, reservoir characterization, mainly in terms of the porosity and permeability of geologic reservoir structures. It is refined and separated, most easily by industrial distillation, into a large number of consumer products, from gasoline (petrol) and kerosene to asphalt and chemical reagents used to make plastics and pharmaceuticals. Petroleum is used in manufacturing a wide variety of materials, and it is estimated that the world consumes about 90 million barrels each day.
USA has come up as a huge contributor to the total petroleum production in the world. Its contribution amounts to almost 25% of the total production of petroleum globally. Subsequent contributors in this line of huge petroleum producing countries are Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, United Arab Emirates, etc. A complete list of countries by its petroleum production can be found here.
Petroleum is a fossil fuels. It take millions of years to form and therefore it is also considered to be a non-renewable energy source. We should use petroleum products (oil and gas) judiciously and try to save them as far as possible. Five ways how Petroleum reservoirs are formed can be understood from the self-explanatory image below. In the above map the Oil Production Sites i.e., those red circles represent the locations on the earth's surface from where the Petroleum reservoirs are accessed through sub-surface drilling to collect the crude oil from the trap shown below.
Subsurface accumulations of Oil and Gas in Reservoir
