Petroleum Distribution Characteristics of the Americas and the Exploration Prospect Analysis

The world's present demand for oil and gas is still in a rapid growth period, and traditional oil and gas resources account for more than 60% of the global oil and gas supply. The Americas is the world's second largest production and consumption center of liquid fuel, and is also the world's largest natural gas producer. In 2016, the Americas had 85.3 billion tons of proven oil reserves and 18.7 trillion m³ of proven natural gas reserves, which account for 35.4% and 10.0% of world's total reserves, respectively. It produced 1267.1 Mt of oil and 1125.4 billion m³ of natural gas, which account for 28.9% and 31.7% of the world's total production, respectively. The crude oil and natural gas reserves are mainly distributed in the U.S., Canada and Venezuela. The U.S. is the earliest and most successful country in shale gas exploration and development, and its shale gas is concentrated in the southern, central and eastern U.S., including the Marcellcus shale, Barnett shale, EagleFord shale, Bakken shale, Fayettevis shale, Haynsvill shale, Woodford shale and Monterey/Santos shale. The potential oil and gas resources in the Americas are mainly concentrated in the anticline and stratigraphic traps in the Middle‐Upper Jurassic slope deposition of the North Slope Basin, the Paleozoic Madsion group dolomite and limestone in the Williston Basin, dominant stratigraphic traps and few structural traps in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin, the Eocene structural‐stratigraphic hydrocarbon combination, structural‐unconformity traps and structural hydrocarbon combination, and the Upper Miocene stratigraphic‐structural hydrocarbon combination in the Maracaibo Basin of Venezuela, the stratigraphic‐structural traps and fault horst, tilting faulted blocks and anticlines related to subsalt structure and basement activity in the Campos Basin, the subsalt central low‐uplift belt and supra‐salt central low‐uplift belt in the Santos Basin of Brazil, and the structural‐stratigraphic traps in the Neuquen Basin of Argentina. In addition, the breakthrough of seismic subsalt imaging technology makes the subsalt deepwater sea area of eastern Barzil an important oil and gas potential area.