About Petroleum Exploration and Development

Petroleum Exploration and Development

Petroleum Exploration and Development is an English-language journal of petroleum science published on behalf of the Research Institute of Petroleum Exploration and Development (RIPED) of PetroChina in Beijing. It is the English edition of a Chinese journal founded in 1974, and it publishes original research on petroleum geology, the exploration and development of oil and gas fields, reservoir engineering and petroleum engineering, with a particular record in the unconventional resources — shale gas, shale oil and tight oil — that have transformed Chinese petroleum research. The journal appears six times a year, is fully open access, carries the print ISSN 2096-4803 and the online ISSN 1876-3804, and is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded, Engineering Index (EI) and Scopus.

The journal's position follows from its owner. RIPED is the central research institute of PetroChina, China's largest oil and gas producer, so the title sits closer than most academic journals to the operational heart of a national petroleum industry. Its pages carry work from PetroChina's own researchers alongside contributions from Chinese petroleum universities, Sinopec and the wider international community, and its most-cited papers are field-defining studies of Chinese shale gas and unconventional hydrocarbons.

Origins in 1974 and the English edition

The Chinese journal from which Petroleum Exploration and Development derives was founded in 1974, a period when China's petroleum industry was expanding around fields such as Daqing and when the country was building the technical literature of a self-reliant oil sector. For decades the title served that domestic professional community in Chinese. The English edition — identified on its articles as the online English edition of the Chinese-language journal — was created to carry the results of Chinese petroleum research to international readers, and its Scopus coverage runs from 2008.

The timing of the English edition's growth was significant. From the late 2000s, Chinese petroleum research changed character: the easy conventional accumulations were mature, and attention shifted to deep reservoirs, tight sandstones, shale gas in the Sichuan Basin and continental shale oil. Those programmes generated results of worldwide interest at exactly the moment the English edition became established, and the journal's rising international profile since then is inseparable from the unconventional-resources research wave it has documented.

RIPED, PetroChina and the KeAi publishing model

The journal is owned by the Research Institute of Petroleum Exploration and Development, PetroChina, which retains copyright in the compiled journal and issues. Publishing services are provided by Elsevier through its KeAi imprint — the Beijing-based partnership through which many Chinese institute journals are produced and hosted on ScienceDirect. Articles therefore appear with Elsevier DOIs and are presented on the same platform as Elsevier's international energy titles, while editorial ownership remains with the Chinese institute.

Petroleum Exploration and Development is a fully open access journal: every peer-reviewed research article is published open access, freely readable immediately on publication, with the open access costs borne by RIPED rather than charged as a conventional article fee model borne by readers. For an industry journal this matters practically as well as academically — engineers and geologists at operating companies, service firms and smaller institutions, who may lack large subscription bundles, can read its field studies and methods papers without a paywall.

Aims and scope

The journal states its aims plainly: to contribute to the scientific and technological development of petroleum exploration and production, to promote the innovative ability of scholars and workers in the field, and to disseminate the latest theoretical and technological developments and research results in China and worldwide relating to petroleum geology, oil and gas field development and petroleum engineering. It publishes original papers in both Chinese and English across the full span of petroleum science.

Its listed subject span is correspondingly industrial in breadth. Alongside the core geoscience and engineering disciplines it explicitly includes oil storage and transportation, oil and gas chemistry, petroleum machinery, petroleum business administration and even the history of the petroleum industry. Few international petroleum journals keep business administration and industry history inside their formal scope; their presence signals a title that serves a whole professional industry, not only its research frontier.

Petroleum geology and exploration

Petroleum geology forms the first pillar of the journal's contents: source rocks and their geochemistry, sedimentary basins and their structural evolution, hydrocarbon generation, migration and accumulation, and the evaluation of exploration prospects. Chinese basins dominate the case load — the Sichuan, Ordos, Songliao, Tarim and Junggar basins recur throughout the journal — but the models developed from them, on subjects such as continuous hydrocarbon accumulation in tight and shale systems, are presented as contributions to general petroleum geology.

Geophysics and geochemistry support this work throughout the journal's pages: seismic interpretation of deep and complex structures, well-log evaluation of low-permeability reservoirs, and the organic geochemistry by which Chinese laboratories characterise lacustrine source rocks. Because many Chinese reservoirs are continental rather than marine in origin — lake-deposited source rocks and tight fluvial-lacustrine sandstones rather than the marine shales of North America — the journal's exploration literature offers the international reader a systematically different petroleum geology from that of the classic marine basins.

The unconventional resources record

The journal's most influential contribution is its documentation of China's unconventional oil and gas programme. Its most-cited papers include "Geological characteristics and resource potential of shale gas in China", "Unconventional hydrocarbon resources in China and the prospect of exploration and development" and a study of the formation and enrichment of the Jiaoshiba shale gas field in the Sichuan Basin — the field at the centre of the Fuling development, China's flagship commercial shale gas project. Papers such as the 2019 re-examination of what "unconventional" means, taking the Wufeng–Longmaxi shale gas of the Sichuan Basin as its example, show the journal publishing conceptual as well as empirical work: defining continuous accumulation, source-reservoir integration and in-situ enrichment as the theoretical basis of the Chinese unconventional programme.

Continental shale oil and tight oil receive the same treatment, with research on the Ordos Basin's tight sandstones and lacustrine shales standing among the journal's signature subjects. For international researchers, Petroleum Exploration and Development has consequently become a primary English-language window on a body of unconventional research that would otherwise be accessible mainly in Chinese — and on reservoirs whose geology differs enough from North American plays that the Chinese literature constitutes an independent evidence base rather than a repetition.

Reservoir engineering and field development

The development half of the title covers reservoir engineering, reservoir protection and stimulation, and the management of producing fields: characterisation of porosity and permeability in tight formations, hydraulic fracturing, horizontal well design, enhanced oil recovery and the long-term development of mature waterflooded fields. Enhanced recovery methods — including carbon dioxide injection, polymer flooding and related techniques — form a recognised strand, connecting the journal to the carbon capture, utilisation and storage questions now attached to mature-field operations.

This engineering content reflects the journal's institute base. RIPED's remit covers the producing life of PetroChina's fields, and the journal's development papers often report field-scale trials and applications rather than laboratory work alone. Readers in operating companies can therefore find, alongside theory, documented Chinese field practice in drilling, completion and production optimisation, including the application of digital and intelligent technologies to oilfield operations that has become a growing theme in Chinese petroleum engineering.

Publication pattern and indexing

The journal publishes six issues a year on ScienceDirect, where its current issues and archive are hosted under its online ISSN 1876-3804; the print ISSN is 2096-4803. Its editorial address is in Beijing, and its articles are published in English with the apparatus — DOIs, references and structured abstracts — standard on the Elsevier platform.

Indexing in the Science Citation Index Expanded, EI and Scopus places the journal inside the main evaluation and discovery systems for both geoscience and engineering. In Scopus-derived rankings it has stood in the first quartile across categories including geology, geochemistry and petrology, economic geology and energy engineering — an unusually strong bibliometric position for an institute journal, and one explained by the citation weight of its shale gas and unconventional resources papers, which are referenced by researchers far beyond China.

Readership and significance

The journal's readers are petroleum geologists, geophysicists, reservoir engineers and production specialists in research institutes, universities and operating companies, in China and internationally. Its author base shows the same structure: PetroChina is its largest contributing affiliation, followed by institutions such as China University of Petroleum and Sinopec, with a growing international contribution. It functions, in effect, as the English-language journal of record of the Chinese petroleum research establishment.

Petroleum Exploration and Development ultimately illustrates how a national industry journal becomes an international one. Founded in 1974 for a domestic profession, carried into English as China's petroleum problems became problems the whole industry shared, and published open access by the research institute of the country's largest producer, it now occupies a distinctive niche: the place where the geology and engineering of China's basins — above all its shale and tight reservoirs — are reported to the world by the institutions that explore and produce them.