This book is a summary of the life work of the petroleum geologist, Li Guoyu. His thesis is that any sedimentary rock filled basin is likely to have some oil and gas in it. This is likely as the sedimentary material when it is deposited will contain some organic material and if it is a basin it is, in effect, trapped. It does not follow that all basins contain oil or that those that do will be exploitable. However, it does provide a more optimistic view of carbon futures than models based on known deposits. Even if we cease to need oil and gas as fuel, and I do not see that happening very soon, we will still need hydrocarbons as raw materials for manufacturing carbon based chemicals. The author's optimistic estimate is that there is a trillion tons of oil in the reserves.
The book is set out in a 105 short chapters. The first ten give an overview of world geology, classification of basins by cross section, economic data and the like. This is followed by chapters on countries and parts of countries. The first area covered is Asia, and China, where Li Guoyu is based, comes first. There then follows Africa, Europe, North America and South America. A final group of chapters covers Australasia and the Poles. The degree of detail depends on how much is already known of the particular basins. For example, Mozambique and surrounding countries where there a just two know gas sites is extensive. At the other end the Appalachian Basin in the USA gets a separate entry because its reserves are well known. For areas where there is active exploitation sites are indicated and pipelines are shown. That there is a potential oil resource under the South Pole raises many technical and environmental issues.
This book is a useful resource to the oil and gas industry even if it does not share the author's confidence in future supplies. It is also useful for teaching petroleum geology as the maps and cross‐sections provide many good examples. I offered to review this book partly from an interest in development and climate change, where the facts in this book and the underlying theory are relevant, but also from a liking for maps. I found the book very easy to use. The maps and cross‐sections are easily understood. The key to the maps is very helpful. It does, however, not explain the double blue line, but as this only appears on the polar maps I assume it is to do with sea ice.
