Rifts and Passive Margins

Rifts and passive margins are extremely important for the petroleum industry, as they are areas of high sedimentation and can contain significant oil and gas resources. This book provides a comprehensive understanding of rifts and passive margins as a whole. It synthesises in one volume the existing information devoted to specific aspects of these vitally important hydrocarbon habitats. This collection of state-of-the-art information on the topic facilitates the better use of this knowledge to assess the risks of exploring and operating in these settings and the development of systematic and predictive hydrocarbon screening tools. The book will be invaluable for a broad range of readers, from advanced geology students and researchers to exploration geoscientists to exploration managers exploring for and developing hydrocarbon resources in analogous settings.

'This is a large, comprehensive reference book … best treated as an encyclopedia, providing a thorough, basic summary of the essential components of basin and hydrocarbon development, and as an extensive reference list that provides access to more detailed information if required. The author's breadth of knowledge is shown by the variety of examples drawn from rifts and passive margins around the world. The material includes sufficient descriptions, examples, and mathematical equations to convey the fundamentals of the concepts without bogging the reader down in unnecessary details. The text is dense, but well organized and comprehensible … I usually donate my review copies of books to the library immediately, but there is so much information in this book that it will reside on my shelf for a while yet.' Ray Wood, The Leading Edge

Michal Nemčok is a research professor at the Energy and Geoscience Institute at the University of Utah and a visiting professor at the Energy and Geoscience Institute Laboratory at the Geological Institute SAV, Bratislava, Slovak Republic. He has performed structural and hydrocarbon evaluations in numerous rift settings, such as the Pannonian Basin system of the Czech Republic and Slovakia; the Basin and Range of the western United States; the Bristol Channel Basin; the Central Basin, Democratic Republic of Congo; and the Salton Sea region in California. He has also worked in many passive margin settings, such as West India, East India, the eastern United States and Canada, the African margins of the Central Atlantic, the equatorial Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, the Guyana-Suriname Basin, Gabon and Cameroon, the Black Sea region and southeastern Brazil. The results of most of these studies have been presented in thirty-two articles published in refereed scientific journals and in two edited books. He is the co-author of Thrustbelts: Structural Architecture, Thermal Regimes and Petroleum Systems (Cambridge, 2005).