Abstract:

As China offshore area lies rightly in the convergence area where Eurasian, IndianAustralian and the Pacific Ocean plates meet, the generation and evolution of basins in this area is under controls of the interaction between ocean and continental plates, which means the regional tectonic setting plays a significant role during basin formation and evolution. Under the impact and control of this special tectonic setting, China offshore basins have significant segmentation and discrepancy evolutional features. Those basins from the Bohai Bay Basin to the South Yellow Sea, via the North Yellow Sea, are belonging to the intracontinental rift basin; the East China Sea basins are the retroarc rift basins in the active continental margin; the Pearl River Mouth Basin and Qiongdongnan Basin belong to passive continental margin basins; the Yinggehai Basin is a transform continental margin basin. As a result, the oil and gas distribution is also characterized by segmentation and partition. Intracontinental basins from Bohai Bay to South Yellow Sea are mainly oilproducing; the retroarc basins of East China Sea are primarily producing gas; the northern part of the continental margin of northern South China Sea is basically oil and the southern part is mainly gas; the transform Yinggehai basin produces gas as priority. The future oil exploration fields of China offshore area would be on the Bohai Bay Basin, the northern part of Pearl River Mouth Basin and Beibu Gulf Basin; while the gas exploration areas should be mainly focused on the East China Sea, deep water area of northern South China Sea and Yinggehai Basin.

Key words:  China offshore, tectonic setting, tectonic segmentation, basin types, structural evolution