Late Jurassic Source Rock Super-Highway on Conjugate Margins of the North and Central Atlantic (offshore East Coast Canada, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Morocco)

Canada possesses petroleum resources second only to Saudi Arabia: 178 Bbbls of oil and more than 60 Tcf of gas. The great majority of Canada‟s conventional and nonconventional petroleum resources are located in Western Canada Sedimentary Basin (WCSB) and the adjacent Thrust and Foreland belts. During the past decade Canada‟s contingent oil reserves have increased 36 fold due to inclusion of WCSB oil sand reserves that became technologically producible in 2003. A large quantity of other nonconventional oil and gas resources from sources such as coalbed methane, tight sands gas, gas shale and tight oil reservoirs were also added in the past decade to the basin‟s endowment. In addition to Western Canada‟s resources, a large amount of Canada‟s new petroleum resources are found in the sedimentary basins located in the Atlantic Canada, the Arctic and in lesser known basins scattered onshore and offshore. These basins, commonly known as Frontier basins, are lightly explored and may contain further important petroleum reserves. Currently, only the East Coast offshore Mesozoic basins of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland contain producing oil and gas fields, most of which were discovered in the late 1970s to early 1980s when a Canadian Government exploration stimulus program - the National Energy Program (NEP) - was in place. Presently, Canada‟s only significant oil production outside Alberta, comes from offshore Newfoundland (350,000 bbl/d) and the only important natural gas production comes from Nova Scotia shelf (400 MMcf/d). Additionally, large gas discoveries located offshore Labrador and the Sverdrup basin of the eastern arctic await development.

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